


there's a spark catching fire, we'll be fireproof

by sorbusaucuparias (orphan_account)



Series: these things will never change [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: AU, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Pretty Stydia-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-14
Updated: 2016-09-14
Packaged: 2018-08-15 00:56:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 35,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8036011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/sorbusaucuparias
Summary: “I can’t give you a photo, but I can give you a finger.”“Tempting, but you’re fifty minutes away and I’m tired.”She doesn’t have to see him to know that he rolls his eyes.There’s a part of her that wants to be immature and use this as an example of how they can go back to how they used to be.But who they were before isn’t who they are now. Now they know what it’s like to be a couple and what they like during sex and what it’s like to spend lazy Sundays on the couch together.So, where do they go from here?  (Or, Stiles, Lydia, and a crash course in an indeterminate relationship status.)





	1. i

**Author's Note:**

> _I need to know now, can you love me again?_ No, seriously, can you? Please tell me at the end of this fic whether it was worth the year long wait or not. I'm totally hoping you think it was.
> 
> I had the worst case of writer’s block so I had about 10, 000 words written but there was just this one part (which was the original ending and how to get there) that I couldn’t make work. Enter Rachel ([writergirl8](http://archiveofourown.org/users/writergirl8/pseuds/writergirl8)/[rongasm](http://rongasm.tumblr.com/)) who is an absolute saint and did a myriad of wonderful things that helped kick my butt into gear, but most importantly picked up on something that was only going to be a thousand or so angsty words and I ended up exploring that, which is why there's two chapters. She was an incredible beta, which is something I didn’t realise I needed/wanted as much as I did, and had to deal with the most inane messages from me. Thank you for everything!
> 
> Also, shout out to [stydiacast](http://stydiacast.tumblr.com/) as a whole as well as [Maggie](http://redstringbanshee.tumblr.com/) (who I promised there would be a part 3 to, but took way longer to deliver on than I thought I would), [fudgythewhale](http://fudgythewhale.tumblr.com/), and [roe-your-boat](http://roe-your-boat.tumblr.com/) who, with Rachel, recorded two beautiful podcasts about the previous two parts of this series that totally did not make me cry at all. Seriously though, if you haven’t checked out stydiacast yet, you have to. Trust me, you won’t be sorry.'
> 
> Also, shout out to Caitrin ([marvels](http://archiveofourown.org/users/marvels/pseuds/marvels)) who read the first 1000 words of this last November, which ended up not even making it into this fic at all, and who told me that the idea for this part was good before writer's block struck me.
> 
> The title of the fic comes from Fireproof by Coleman Hell. Listen to it, it's fantastic.
> 
> Okay if you've stuck around until the end of these notes, thank you and enjoy the fic.

Every new century has seen more solutions to mathematical problems than the ones that came before it. People become more intuitive and creative and they assess the problems differently that those who came before them. Yet still there are major and minor mathematical problems whose solutions have still not been realized.

Lydia’s going to solve at least one of them in her lifetime.

She has a notebook filled with the equations that interest her the most, she’s spent nights with it on her lap, pencil scribbling across the lines before furiously rubbing it out on reconsideration. Originally, she used pen but Stiles pointed out that, even with her precise writing, it became illegible when she put a strike through her miscalculations. She waited a few days after that before she started using pencil, but Stiles still grinned when he saw it in her hand.

A part of Lydia wants to believe that the end of their relationship could be compared to the unsolved mathematics problems. Which is a lie.

She also wants to believe that she has hindsight bias. Which is, again, another lie.

So when her mother asks her a few days after the wedding why she and Stiles aren’t together, Lydia doesn’t know what to say. She knows she could tell the truth – explain everything that happened and everything that didn’t, explain everything they said and everything they didn’t, explain that she loves him and he loves her and that wasn’t enough – and she does briefly toy with the idea before ultimately deciding against it.

“We have different goals.”

Her mother seems to believe her. Allison doesn’t.

However, unlike her mother, Allison doesn’t continue to interrogate her over the break up. They talk about menial topics instead, ones that would normally leave Lydia rolling her eyes but she chooses them over focusing on the decimated remains of her relationship with Stiles. She doesn’t care about the weather, or the high school acquaintances that Allison and Scott ran into at the grocery store, or what’s happening at the diner down the road, but she’ll take them over anything else.

Allison already knows what happened because Stiles told her, Scott and Isaac. Lydia assumes that the latter wasn’t actually supposed to be a part of the conversation but stayed anyway. The only reason Lydia even knows this is _through_ Isaac, who sent her a succinct yet incredibly informing text message almost exactly as Lydia was about to leave their apartment. Lydia hadn’t even had a destination in mind, she just knew she didn’t want to wait around in their apartment and see Stiles when he got home. Her bags had sat in the trunk of her car while Lydia sat in a diner, stirring the same cup of coffee for three hours. Eventually, she sent a text to Allison and left to stay with her. Allison hadn’t given her a time frame for when to leave, Kate spends more time travelling than she does in Berkeley anyway.

So, in the week since the wedding, Lydia’s been sleeping in the guest room and avoiding social media and working on equations and going to classes. She’s also been reassuring herself that she’s going to be okay without having Stiles as a constant in her life.

And right there?

That’s denial.

Which is something that Lydia denies when her brain recognises it.

It makes her think about when her parents were getting divorced and they made her see a therapist because they were worried about her reaction to the separation. Honestly though, if Lorraine hadn’t said anything and scolded them for using Lydia like the rope in a game of tug-of-war, they probably wouldn’t have bothered. Seeing a therapist was good, it let Lydia talk with a third party who was actually listening and not contemplating ways to use her feelings for their own agenda.

A part of her wishes she could go back to that period of her life, not so she can be part of the battlefield masquerading as a divorce again but so she can interrogate her therapist for ways to make denial easier.

Or, really, ways to get past the denial stage of the Kübler-Ross model and into anger.

Lydia can do anger.

Lydia can _act_ on anger.

She can cut up his favorite hoodie and mail it to him, or put hair dye in his shampoo again, or do anything that lets her act on her anger.

Because she shouldn’t be in denial, it’s not like she’s denying their relationship is over.

(She is. She hasn’t changed her relationship status yet, but she thinks that’s inconsequential in comparison to ignoring a problem in their relationship for two months.)

Maybe if Lydia wants to move through denial and reach anger, she needs to actively acknowledge she and Stiles are no longer in a relationship in every possible way. It’s annoying that the Five Stages of Grief doesn’t come with a Virgil-esque guide.

It’s when she’s logged on that she notices something that _barrels_ her straight into anger.

He’s changed it before she has.

_He’s changed it before she has?_

Lydia sees red.

She knows she should probably be upset because they’re officially telling people that their relationship is over and there’s no coming back from it. But she’s not, she’s livid. There are 7 unopened messages in her inbox, guys from high school and work, that Lydia deletes when she notices they’re all contrived sympathies masking pitiful attempts to get in her pants. If she has an overwhelming desire to sleep with someone to get over Stiles, she’ll fly to New York.

Eventually, she finds herself back on Stiles’ wall, wishing there was a way she could take a sledgehammer to it.

It’s just so blatant.

 

**Stiles Stilinski is single.**

_A post from three days ago._

 

For three whole days, he’s been admitting he’s single while she, like an idiot, has still been ‘in a relationship’.

While she, like an idiot, has found herself wearing his favorite hoodie and wishing that the scent attached was stronger; it still smells like him, but now she’s starting to coalesce with the smell and its scent is more like their bed than only him.

While she, like an idiot, has found herself realizing that they have never had seven days of radio silence between them. They’ve never gone a week without, _at least_ , a sardonic acknowledgment since they first lived under the same roof.

She’s staring at his stupid profile picture on her laptop as her finger hovers over his contact information on her phone. Lydia feels her heart flutter momentarily before continuing its loud thumping against her chest.

There is a moment when she contemplates what she’s doing.

It feels like she’s picking at a scab that only beginning to heal.

(She’s wearing his hoodie. It’s not a scab, it’s an infected open wound and she’s carving at it with a blunt, oxidized spoon.)

But her anger takes hold and she taps the call button, bringing the phone up to her ear. Lydia has an overwhelming awareness that it’s three a.m. and she’s listening to her phone ring the ex-boyfriend that she walked away from a week ago at his father’s wedding reception; she just doesn’t care.

“Yeah?” Stiles groggily answers.

“You’re single?” Her tone is louder than it should be at this time in the morning but, again, she just doesn’t care.

“Lydia?”

“Who else?”

“I have suitors.”

“Well, being ambidextrous does give you two suitors to choose between.”

There’s a pause, which makes Lydia wish she’d facetimed him instead so she could see the stupid expression on his face.

“You’re single?” she repeats, her tone more annoyed than before.

“You’re in a relationship?” he bites back.

She exhales loudly through her nose before briefly shaking her head. “I didn’t know we were changing it.”

Stiles lets out a hollow laugh.

“What?”

“Lydia, we broke up.”

“I remember.”

“You left me a post-it note.”

“I know.”

“ _Thank you for being the one who picked me up from Danny’s._ ”

“I’m aware of what I wrote, Stiles.”

“Okay then, so why wouldn’t we change our statuses?” He’s exasperated, which reverberates through the receiver, and she’s about to reply when she hears his light-bulb moment. His chuckle is sincere that time and it cuts through her. “Oh, for the love of god... _You_ wanted to be the first one to change it. That’s why you’re pissed at me. Why didn’t you?”

She wants to start an argument. She wants to tell him that it’s his fault to begin with because he left and then he proposed and then he left _again_. Except, _rationally_ , Lydia knows that none of that would have happened if his father hadn’t been shot.

So, maybe she’s still in denial.

And maybe she’s frustrated that Stiles isn’t.

Because maybe she doesn’t want to believe that they can’t come back from this.

Maybe she should have just become friends with her denial because then she wouldn’t call Stiles at three a.m.

It wouldn’t be that hard; she became friends with Isaac after all. Though, their friendship was born through mutual understanding and reciprocal orgasms and Lydia can’t do that with a coping mechanism.

“I miss you.”

It’s not a rushed statement that comes out in one breath.

It’s not her manipulative attempt to make him feel like an asshole for telling all of their friends, family, and acquaintances that he’s single before she did.

It’s an entirely true statement that falls from her lips as easily as saying “I love you” once did.

And, logically, Lydia’s aware that it might be one of the last he ever hears from her.

Stiles’ silence is deafening.

Stiles once managed to talk his way out of a speeding ticket when he almost winged a squirrel. This was after ignoring a stop sign and a poorly hidden Beacon Hills Sheriff’s Department vehicle. Yet he got away with it by delivering an entirely convoluted speech, which included a spiel about arrogance of squirrels and ended with him shamelessly flattering the officer. Despite this, however, Stiles never seems to have the right words when it counts.

Even his breathing seems steady, which irks Lydia, and she wants to chew him out for not saying anything. There are very few people in her life who she’s honest and open with, so when there isn’t a response to that, something crawls under her skin and sets it alight.

“I miss you too,” Stiles eventually replies.

A silence settles between them. It’s not awkward or tense; it’s just a silence.

It’s peaceful.

It makes her miss what they used to be. Who they used to be. How they used to be.

And, yes, Lydia is completely aware that calling Stiles at three a.m. is not the best way to cope with their breakup. Or barrel her into anger. Or try to comprehend how she ended up sleeping in Allison’s (technically, _Kate’s_ ) spare bedroom with half her stuff and an empty space next to her that she can’t roll into because Stiles is supposed to be there.

But here’s the thing: Lydia doesn’t care.

Because her heart is in pieces and even thinking about putting it back together makes her realize it’s not a jigsaw puzzle; it’s painful and messy and fragmented. All of her pieces are different sizes and shapes, and she can’t make them fit together and Stiles can’t either but at least talking to him makes her feel like eventually she will.

“We can’t go back to how we were,” Stiles states, effectively breaking the peaceful silence they had been sharing. His tone isn’t one of anger or frustration but seems mournful and pierces at the open wound that the phone call is already butchering.

“I know.”

“We broke up.”

She rolls her eyes, bringing her knees up to her chest. “You don’t have to remind me, Stiles, I was there.”

There’s a pause on his end, which is followed by a sigh. “And we can’t be friends.”

Lydia scoffs. “How did you reach that verdict?”

“We weren’t before.”

“We weren’t friends?”

“You put itching powder in my helmet. Coach almost benched me for the season.”

“You won the game.”

“To spite you.”

“Obviously.”

“And I still almost got benched,” Stiles continues, his annoyance radiating through the phone. “I thought we had an unspoken agreement about what was off limits.”

“Then why was my history paper fair game?” Lydia questions.

It seems to perplex Stiles, who stays quiet on his end as he considers every possible answer he could give her. He’s had almost three years, he should have at least one reasonable answer by now. Especially if he wants to add their pranks into the conversation to begin with.

“Wow, Stiles Stilinski speechless? I wish I had a photo to commemorate this moment.”

“I can’t give you a photo, but I can give you a finger.”

“Tempting, but you’re fifty minutes away and I’m tired.”

She doesn’t have to see him to know that he rolls his eyes.

There’s a part of her that wants to be immature and use this as an example of how they can go back to how they used to be.

But who they were before isn’t who they are now. Now they know what it’s like to be a couple and what they like during sex and what it’s like to spend lazy Sundays on the couch together.

So, where do they go from here?

They can’t disregard each other when their best friends are in a relationship and they have mutual friends.

They can’t fall back into pranking each other, even though Lydia has a list accumulating in her mind as she listens to him breathe.

But they _can_ find a new facet of their relationship, somewhere between antagonistic and beneficial.

Because, what’s the alternative?

How can they coexist in the same group of friends and not interact?

Lydia’s living with Allison for the foreseeable future. Stiles is now officially related to Scott. They’re going to see each other whether they like it or not because they don’t like that many people so they share friends.

“Do you know where my Beacon Hills hoodie is?” Stiles asks, breaking her reverie.

Lydia’s caught off-guard by the question, her brows furrowing together momentarily. “What?”

There’s a shuffling sound on his end and what sounds like him tripping and falling over, which makes her corners of her lips tug upwards. He’s slightly winded when he picks up his phone again, which makes her smile grow. “I swear I’ve looked everywhere. Twice.”

“Now seems like the optimal time to question me on the whereabouts of a hoodie?”

“Not _a_ hoodie, Lydia. My _favorite_ hoodie,” Stiles retorts. “And I didn’t think it’d be appropriate to call you first just to ask you about it.”

“But now is appropriate?” Lydia exasperatedly questions.

“You called first.”

“Your logic astounds me.”

“You say the sweetest things to me, Lydia Martin.”

She sighs before her gaze drift down to the Beacon Hills High logo attached to the hoodie she has on. She gives a nonchalant shrug, despite knowing Stiles can’t see her. “I have no idea where it is. Did you mix it in with someone else’s laundry?”

“What you’re saying is that I should start knocking on doors,” Stiles declares, sounding completely serious when he does.

“I would advise against that.”

“What about fliers?”

“For a hoodie?”

“For my favorite hoodie.”

“Still an article of clothing.”

“You used fliers when Prada was missing.”

“Did you honestly just compare my dog to a hoodie?”

“No, I compared a hoodie to your ankle-biting demon wolf.”

Lydia lets out a small yet audible groan, adjusting herself more comfortably on the bed as she does. “You were never bit.”

“Nipped is still bit,” Stiles states, even though it’s more like a rehearsed response at this point.

“Blood was never drawn.”

“Your dog still bit me.”

“That’s what happens when you almost drop a box on an animal, they react.”

“The biting was the causation, not the reaction,” Stiles groans.

“The _nipping_ was the reaction, not the causation,” Lydia argues. “You’re being dramatic.”

“I’m not being dramatic,” Stiles maintains, before letting out a desolate sigh. “I could have lost my leg.”

“To a dog who managed to scare itself with its own sneezes.”

“ _And_ I still maintain that you sicced Cujo on me.”

Lydia rolls her eyes.

They’ve had this argument before.

In fact, they’ve had it multiple times.

When it first happened, the argument lasted two hours and resulted in Natalie and the Sheriff leaving them money for takeout before actually leaving to get dinner by themselves. Though only ten minutes of the first argument actually centred on semantics, which then trailed off into the history of rabies, the possibility of lycanthropy, and the symbolism in fairy tales.

This argument, however, stays on the topic of Prada for longer than Lydia expects. It’s at least thirty minutes before they finally reach the same conclusion they always do.

“You realize things like that happen because you’re an ass,” Lydia says. It’s not with her usual tone of annoyance, but with a levity that she can’t conceal.

Stiles lets out this overdramatic sigh that makes her smile. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

That’s when it hits her then that they’re going to have to end the call soon.

It also hits her that she doesn’t want to and Stiles must not either, because they sit there in silence for a while. He breathes and she breathes and even though breathing is a basic human function, the familiarity of it envelopes her. This is where everything falls away for a moment and Lydia Martin actually manages to lose herself. It’s the kind of moment she needs more of. It’s one she’s been craving for the past seven days since she walked away from him.

She doesn’t want every call between them or text message or even the mere mention of Stiles to dredge up that heartbreak. She wants to put it in the past, leave it in the past, bury it among other wreckages in her history and forget it.

“Did you know Caligula appointed his horse as a priest?” Stiles asks softly into the phone.

“Why would I know that?”

“One night you wouldn’t let me sleep because you wanted to talk about Cleopatra.”

“Who had a relationship with Gaius Julius Caesar, not Gaius Julius Caesar _Germanicus_.”

“So you do know about Caligula,” Stiles concludes and she can just picture the self-satisfied expression on his face.

Her eyes roll of their own volition before she gives him a small laugh and he continues spouting facts about Caligula.

Maybe they can just be friends.

 

 

* * *

 

 

They can’t _just_ be friends.

They just _can’t_ admit it.

 

 

* * *

 

 

They start talking more.

It’s a slow process.

Sometimes he’ll send her a message about something inconsequential or an emoji and she’ll respond and it’ll transpire into an argument about something else inconsequential.

They don’t talk about anything important and they never bring up their break up again; it’s easier developing this new facet of their relationship if they don’t look back.

He isn’t anywhere near the apartment when she packs up the rest of her stuff and moves it into Allison’s.

He doesn’t send her an apology or an explanation, which she’s grateful for, but he does send her a text about Avogadro's law.

Lydia waits until all her boxes are in Allison’s spare room before she sends him a text correcting everything he sent her.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“So, that’s it?”

Stiles pauses his search for peanut butter to turn and look at Scott. “Our parents got married a few weeks ago and you want to talk about me and Lydia?”

Scott deliberates for a moment before giving a terse nod of his head. “Yeah.”

He rolls his eyes before picking up the bag of pretzels and throwing them to ( _at,_ semantics really) Scott. “Okay, well, that’s it.”

Scott considers this for a moment, taking the time to turn on Stiles’ playstation, before shaking his head. “That’s not it.”

“It’s not?” Stiles incredulously asks before fist pumping the air briefly. He reaches in to grab the unopened jar of peanut butter Lydia probably pushed to the back of the cupboard.

“You proposed out of fear, she rejected you--”

“Lydia didn’t _reject_ me.”

“She didn’t accept.”

Stiles grimaces as he takes the empty space beside Scott and puts the jar on the coffee table. “She _declined_ my offer.”

“Declined, rejected; synonyms.”

“Well, I like declined better.”

“She said ‘no’,” Scott exasperatedly offers.

“Lydia said ‘no’,” Stiles affirms with a brisk nod of his head.

“I would have too.”

Stiles places his hand against his chest and melodramatically gasps. “You would say ‘no’ if I asked you to marry me, Scotty?”

“Technically you are my brother.”

“Only by marriage.”

“What would our parents think?”

“It doesn’t matter, our love can survive anything.”

“But what about Allison?”

“I assume we would have an understanding. Possibly even a rotation. Like, she’d get Sunday through to Wednesday and I’d get Thursday through to Saturday. We’d make it work, Scott.”

Scott pretends to momentarily contemplate the idea, before he smiles and runs his tongue along the paper. “And how long are you gonna avoid talking about it?”

“Oh, I can go for months, just ask Lydia,” Stiles says with a self-deprecating smile. He tilts his head towards Scott, who stops trying to get his lighter to work to meet his eyes. “Dude, I really don’t want to talk about. You told me not to propose, I did it anyway, I screwed up, we broke up and now Lydia and I are friends; that’s all there is to it. So, can we get high and play now or are we gonna have to dissect my tendency to mask my pain with sarcasm and quick wit?”

Scott’s brows furrow before he acquiesces and lights up, and Stiles chooses a game, even though it doesn’t actually matter. They have a routine and Stiles knows they’ll end up binge-watching an old sitcom in the next few hours after they respawn for the fourth time in whatever game they’re playing.

It only takes three respawns before Scott tries to hand Stiles the controller so he can start searching for something to watch. Stiles is a little too preoccupied to respond; he’s using his left hand to eat peanut butter and his right to snapchat Lydia. It takes him a few attempts to take a good selfie before he decides to take one of Scott instead, captioning it with three ghost emojis and one eggplant.

Her reply is a selfie; her hair is in a messy bun, she’s hardly wearing any makeup and she’s giving him an amused smirk. He doesn’t look at her caption, he’s too busy taking a screenshot before the time runs out. It’s a miracle that he actually manages to, smearing peanut butter on his phone as he does.

His phone vibrates a few seconds later while he’s watching Scott dance to the Friends theme song.

 

**From: Lydia Martin                         Today 4:37 pm**

**_Subtle, Stilinski._ **

 

**To: Lydia Martin                              Today 4:39 pm**

**I like alliteration.**

 

**From: Lydia Martin                         Today 4:41 pm**

**_You’re ruining my productivity, Stoner Stilinski._ **

 

**From: Lydia Martin                         Today 4:44 pm**

**_Call me tomorrow._ **

 

 

* * *

 

 

He does.

They end up discussing the structures of eighties cartoons.

Neither of them bring up the screenshot, which Stiles is happy about since he stared at it before he fell asleep.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Sometimes he has dreams about Lydia that scare the crap out of him. Especially since they’re trying to just be friends.

Because, here’s the thing, they’re not sex dreams; Stiles is well equipped to handle sex dreams featuring Lydia.

They're _domesticity_ dreams.

Lydia in her yoga pants doing the crossword and pretending like she actually needs his help, which was usually just her subtle way of luring him over to the couch to make out.

Lydia sitting on the counter, reading him the draft of the essay she’s currently writing, while Stiles makes dinner.

Lydia propping her legs over his as they marathon a show one of their friends recommended.

Lydia in the shower talking to him as he shaves.

He makes the mistake of telling Scott, who uses it as verification that there’s more to them than just friends.

Stiles blames the screenshot.

But he still won’t delete it.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Lydia and Stiles haven’t actually spent any time together. They call and text and facetime but they haven’t seen each other in person since the reception.

Which changes when Lydia decides to join Allison when she goes to meet Scott at a bar near the apartment.

And it’s amazing because seeing Stiles sitting opposite Scott doesn’t make her feel nauseous. Allison still cautiously glances over at her when they both enter the bar, silently wondering whether this could become volatile.

Lydia exhales, rolling her eyes as she does, and begins to move through the throngs of people to join the guys. She slides into the booth, wordlessly taking the empty space beside Stiles. The guys’ conversation quickly fizzles as they acknowledge the new arrivals. Scott’s gaze darts between Lydia and Stiles, almost like he’s considering what Allison was, but quickly falls to Allison as she slips in next to him.

“Hey,” Scott says to Allison, leaning over to wrap his arm around her.

“Hey,” Allison replies before pressing her lips to his. Once she pulls away, she turns her attention to Stiles. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Stiles returns. He finally tilts his head to properly look at Lydia and plasters a smile on his lips. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Lydia parrots then glances at Scott. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Is that everyone?” Stiles asks with a smile. “Did we miss anyone?”

Scott draws an invisible line between each pair with his index finger before beaming. “We’re good to go.”

“Awesome. So, where do you two stand on the Loch Ness Monster?”

“The Loch Ness Monster?” Lydia incredulously asks.

“Possibly just a giant catfish?” Stiles inserts, ignoring Scott’s glare.

“How long have you two been talking about this?” Allison inquires, her eyes assessing their half-empty bottles of beer.

“Long enough that people asked us to move somewhere noisier,” Stiles answers.

“He jumped on a chair when he started talking about Bigfoot,” Scott explains.

“Hey, I was making a damn good point, Scott.”

“Dude, you almost broke a tray of shot glasses.”

“You were pretending to be Bigfoot?” Lydia probes.

“Yes!” Stiles exclaims, his grin stretching across his face. He tilts his head in her direction and Lydia feels the warmth radiating off his smile begin to spread throughout her body. It feels like how they used to be. Before they broke up, before they dated, before they were step-siblings, before whatever happened in the summer between freshman and sophomore, when it was just the four of them sitting around and talking. They hardly ever delved into anything major, they usually started with something simple and went off on a tangent; he always knew how to rile her.

Whoever they are, whatever relationship they have now, it’s a result of the consequences of their actions, not a carbon copy of what used to be.

“Do you want to get drinks?” Allison asks Lydia before she removes herself from Scott’s embrace with a smile. Lydia nods, sliding out of the booth again.

She and Allison begin to walk to the bar before Lydia stops, glances over her shoulder and locks eyes with Stiles. “Bigfoot is an idiot’s prank gone awry.”

Lydia turns away before she can see Stiles’ reaction. She can hear it, though; a splutter followed by a sound of indignation followed by a petulant scoff when Scott begins to laugh.

It makes her have faith in her supposition that the two of them can actually be friends.

Or at least that’s the conclusion she comes to when they’re on to their second round of drinks.

They’re all squished closer together now and huddling over their table like they’re discussing matters of grave importance. They’re not; they’re arguing about the legitimacy of the Loch Ness Monster, there’s been a theme for the night’s conversations.

“How can you not believe in the Loch Ness Monster?” Scott asks in amazement.

Stiles shrugs. “A few blurry photos and some sleep-deprived, fanatical eye-witness accounts aren’t proof of anything. Now, if you show me some honest to God evidence, Scott, I’ll go Nessie hunting with you.”

“You do realize that you just set a precedent for yourself that we can use whenever you bring up Bigfoot,” Lydia states.

He looks dumbfounded for a moment before he waggles his index finger at her. “That doesn’t count, there’s proof of Bigfoot.”

“A few blurry photos and some sleep-deprived, fanatical eye-witness accounts aren’t proof of anything,” Lydia repeats, a smile stretching across her lips as she does.

“So, are you saying you believe in Nessie, Lydia?”

Lydia’s nose scrunches up involuntarily at the question. “Of course not.”

“ _Wow_. Where’s the solidarity?” Scott asks, feigning indignation.

“I’m with Lydia,” Allison states before turning to Scott. “You didn’t believe the Beast of Gévaudan was real.”

“I believe that your ancestors killed a giant wolf, I just don’t believe that giant wolf was a werewolf,” Scott explains with a shrug.

Stiles tilts the head of his beer bottle towards his best friend. “Yeah, I’m with Scotty on this one. I mean, werewolves, Allison?”

“Bigfoot, Stiles?” Allison counters with an arch of her brow. Stiles raises his eyebrows in return, taking a drink from his bottle as he does, with a small smirk tugging on his lips.

“Lydia?” Scott asks, turning his attention to her, which draws Allison and Stiles to look as well. She sighs and puts her glass back down on the table.

“Allison, I love you,” Lydia affirms, her eyes on her best friend, who smiles. “But the Beast of Gévaudan is a cryptid. Just like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.”

Scott’s brows furrow momentarily. “So you don’t believe in any of them?”

“No, there are rational explanations for cryptids,” Lydia answers before raising her index finger in Stiles’ direction; she can see his mouth opening out of the corner of her eye and she can feel the cogs in his head turning. So, she adds, “That don’t include their existence.”

A silence falls over the group. Each of them move to sit back against the booth instead of continuing to huddle over the table. Stiles brings his bottle to his mouth before nudging his foot against Lydia’s. She turns her head to see him smirking at her.

“What about mermaids?” he asks, smirking against his bottle before taking a drink.

When Lydia’s nostrils flare, he winks at her.

On the surface it’s an innocent question.

But it’s Stiles asking.

Scott and Allison stare at the two of them before starting a new conversation. When Stiles doesn’t tear his gaze away from her, she forcefully nudges his knee with hers, which makes him splutter, the beer dribbling down his chin. Allison lets out a laugh, her hand coming up to press against her mouth, as Stiles runs the cuff of his flannel across his chin.

“Just like old times,” Scott says as a passing thought.

Which makes Lydia beam, though she hides it as she takes a sip from her glass. Her eyes shift back to Stiles to see him smiling as well, not even trying to conceal it, and her heart stutters.

 

 

* * *

 

 

They start spending more time together.

Sometimes they’re on campus at the same time so they get coffee.

Sometimes they sit in the library and study together in silence.

Sometimes Lydia concedes when Stiles wants to see a live band and they spend their Friday night sitting in coffee shops or bars, debating Stiles’ choice.

Sometimes Stiles concedes when Lydia wants to explore new stores, but he sets the ground rule that she’s not allowed to pick out any new clothes for him.

One Sunday they spend over an hour browsing in a bookstore, it’s a mess of book stacks and mismatched furniture and there’s no inventory system so they just sit in aisles and explore. Lydia trails off into the mustier section, where the bookstore worker told her the “space and science” books were, a statement that Stiles doesn’t think could have been vaguer. Stiles elects to stay where the smell isn’t overpowering and absently runs his finger along the spines of the books as he tries to find one Scott would like. He stops when he notices a copy of ‘The Little Mermaid’. There are illustrations and a faded inscription in the front and before he knows what he’s doing, Stiles is asking the bookstore worker if he can put it on hold so Stiles can buy for Lydia’s birthday when she’s not with him.

There’s one night when they decide to start a Breaking Bad rewatch while they’re sitting on Allison’s couch. They make it through the first three episodes before descending into an argument over Walter White that lasts for longer than either of them expect. Stiles ends up staying over that night and Lydia ends up convincing him to sleep in her room instead of on the couch. So it’s not that surprising when he wakes up with an arm draped over her stomach, but it is surprising that the familiarity of it makes his throat feel dry. Which is why Stiles ends up rolling over onto the other side of the bed before Lydia wakes up.

Then there’s St. Patrick’s Day, when they decide to go to this house party together.

It’s a sea of green and linked limbs and Stiles wraps his hand around Lydia’s wrist so they won’t lose each other. He chooses to move his hand to rest against her back instead after they’ve poured their drinks.

They hardly spend any time talking to anyone else besides each other. They initially choose a corner of the room to claim as their own but when more people start making out and groping, Lydia makes the executive decision to grab his hand and tug him into the less populated hallway. Stiles manages to pick up an oversized pair of sunglasses with his pinkie as Lydia leads him to the staircase. He waits until he’s sitting on the step below her to put them on; they’re obnoxious and totally match the beam tugging the corners of his lips up. Lydia’s not even paying attention to him yet, she’s adjusting herself to rest against the banister and swing her legs over his. He knows when she notices the sunglasses from the overdramatic roll of her eyes.

“Hot,” Lydia pronounces before taking a sip from her cup.

Stiles glances around, his smile growing when he finds a bright green, glitter hat hanging off the banister. He unceremoniously puts it on her head with a flourish of his hand like he’s performing a magic trick.

Rather than taking it off, Lydia gives him an incensed look that he knows was perfected just for him and fixes her hair underneath it.

“Hot,” Stiles parrots before taking a sip from his cup.

They spend two hours sitting on the staircase, talking about everything that comes to mind and avoiding the topics they normally do. Neither of them want to know if the other is dating or considering dating, because they want to be friends, they just don’t want to know about each other’s sex lives. But Stiles has a feeling that he’d know; Lydia’s not as blatant as him, Stiles wouldn’t have even known about Isaac if the dude was stealthy and didn’t set off the terrace light, but he’s sure Allison and Scott would and Scott would probably tell Stiles. Even if he didn’t, Stiles talks to Lydia almost every night and it’s not like she’d ignore a date just to text with him, or call him because she can’t sleep.

She takes one of his arms to lay across her lap so she can trace patterns on his skin with her finger. At first it seems like she’s connecting each of his moles with an invisible line but then it shifts into what he thinks are equations.

“Okay,” Stiles proclaims, using his other hand to place his cup on the step below. “Fuck, Marry, Kill: Emmy Noether, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Ada Lovelace.”

Lydia lets out a derisive nose exhale but doesn’t stop the movement of her finger. Her “ _seriously, Stiles?_ ” left unspoken.

“Since I’m not allowed to use our friends as options,” he petulantly adds.

“When Scott chose to marry you instead of Isaac, you ran around his apartment with your hands in the air, rubbing it in Isaac’s face.”

“Only because he was there.”

Her eyes roll of their own volition. It feels like she’s tracing her name on his forearm and he kind of wishes it was evident for everyone to see.

_L_

_Y_

_D_

_I_

_A_

She underlines it with a soft stroke that makes a small smile briefly appear on his lips. He’s watching her expression, not her finger, because she’s so focused on her undetectable writing and it makes his heart beat a little faster. Her tongue darts out to wet her lips and all he wants to do is kiss her.

Hell, he doesn’t just want to kiss her. He wants to pull her into his lap and have her fingers tugging on his hair and have the fevered movements of their lips make his glasses knock the hat off her head. He wants to hear her soft moans and feel her thighs under his fingertips. He doesn’t even care if they have sex, not that he’d object if she wanted to, but he just wants to have her as close to him as possible.

But he can’t because they’re trying to be just friends and he’s not going to be the ass who ruins that. He's not gonna risk losing his best friend again.

“Can I choose you as my ‘kill’ option?” Lydia flippantly asks.

“Yes,” he answers after he clears his throat. “But I feel like you’d miss me.”

Lydia hums in agreement, her gaze briefly meeting his before falling back to his arm.

“So?” Stiles enquires.

“Fuck Ada, marry Emmy, _kiss_ Maria,” Lydia replies with a smile as she begins to trace his name underneath where hers had been.

Yeah, he definitely wishes that was perceptible to the human eye.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Every year since entering high school, Lydia prides herself on throwing the best birthday party of the year.

Actually, she prides herself on throwing the best parties, regardless of whether there’s a reason behind them or not.

But she had been resolved to not throwing one for her 20th birthday.

It was a resolution that she was happy to have made given that she and Stiles had gotten back to Allison’s at 4 a.m. after the St. Patrick’s Day party. They would have been back sooner if Stiles hadn’t decided to try to climb a tree to prove a point about his athleticism; he didn’t and he tore a hole in his jeans when he lost his balance and fell. Lydia had only managed to sleep for four hours before Stiles woke her up by rolling off her bed. His resounding “ _shit!_ ” rang through her room as did his complaining about the texture of the rug he landed on. Obviously she regretted letting him sleep in her bed, instead of the couch like he normally did, when she went to work tired and the only consolation he gave her was a text message consisting of the dancing woman emoji and a snapchat from him; he was drinking coffee while he was supposed to be working, if Cora’s expression in the background was anything to go off.

However, she regrets it more when she opens the door to Allison’s and over thirty people greet her with an annoyingly loud “ _surprise!_ ”.

Especially when her eyes find Stiles and see the shit-eating grin he’s wearing.

“Happy birthday,” Allison says, rushing over to her and putting an arm around her.

“Wow,” Lydia replies, which she thinks just about sums up her feelings.

To Allison’s credit, she knows how to throw an engaging party that doesn’t leave Lydia wishing she could go into her room and fall asleep. There’s good conversations and music she can stand and people who don’t bore Lydia. Then there’s the drinking game that Stiles and Scott concoct around the dining table that involves two decks of cards and a set of contradictory rules as well as a rule that states that they can add new rules whenever they want. Lydia decides to continue talking to Allison and Danny instead of joining in the game; it’s a decision she’s glad she made when she sees Stiles drinking something that looks like sludge.

It turns out to be a good game though, because it and Scott’s jello shots are what leads to the night ending with Stiles and Scott dedicating a dance to her. It’s mostly high kicks and twirls as they melodramatically lip-sync Dancing Queen. Lydia’s almost sorry that they waited until the end of the party to perform because it’s a masterpiece and only a few people are there to witness it. Lydia decides to film their encore to Gimme Gimme Gimme and send it to Isaac, Malia, and Kira; there’s more flair in the encore, even though it ends with Stiles failing to land on the coffee table and sliding onto the carpet instead and Scott fist-pumping from his spot on the couch.

Still, Lydia feels exhausted when she finally falls back onto her bed. She leaves a space beside her for Stiles to sleep on. He’s still buzzing so Lydia half-expects him to jump onto it, or dive onto it, or dedicate another dance to her that will undoubtedly make her question letting him sleep in her room again.

When he doesn’t, it takes all the strength she has to open her eyes and push herself up on her elbows to look at him. Stiles gives her this small, uncharacteristically sheepish smile before he sits down next to her and pulls a present out of his jacket pocket.

“And here I thought your sprinkler during Lonely Boy was my birthday present,” Lydia says as she sits up and takes the present from him.

“Don’t forget about the pelvic thrusts during You Sexy Thing.”

“The _body rolls_ were for me. The pelvic thrusts were for _Scott_ and _Danny_.”

Stiles opens his mouth, ready to argue, then acquiesces with a nod. “I know how to please my audience.”

A laugh dies on her tongue as she glances down at the book in her lap. Her fingers trace over the cover, following the indent. Her heart begins to thump in her chest, her cheeks warming, and Lydia doesn’t know how to respond. Stiles buys thoughtful gifts for the people he cares about, it’s not exactly a revelation; Lydia just hadn’t expected him to buy anything thoughtful for her.

She mashes her lips together before she smiles. It’s warm and genuine and takes her by surprise just like it takes him. Whatever sheepishness he had felt disappears from his expression as he mirrors her smile.

Briefly, Lydia does question how detrimental it would be if she kissed him. Because he’s not Isaac and the friendship that they’re cultivating is nothing like the one she has with Isaac. Lydia can’t kiss Stiles and not have it mean something or not have there be aftereffects. The two of them can’t hook up without it meaning something. But she still wants to and she doesn’t think she’s only one.

It would be so easy to fall back into him. For them to fall back into each other.

Lydia just has to lean forward.

Which she won’t.

Because it would wreck their friendship and she wants him in her life as more than just someone she has mutual friends with. She can’t risk what they have.

So instead, she chooses to lay back on the bed, placing the book on the nightstand as she does. She pats the space beside her as she curls onto her side. “If you fall out of the bed again, you’ll be sleeping on the couch every time you crash here.”

“Understood.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“You can’t have sex with Stiles.”

“I’m not going to have sex with Stiles.”

“Good,” Isaac says as he bends over to look in the camera, his hands stilling on his fly. “Because it would be the definition of a bad idea and you’re better than that.”

Lydia rolls her eyes but doesn’t look up from her notebook. “Gee thanks.”

“You two broke up for a legitimate reason,” he continues, pointedly ignoring her comment. From the rustling on his end, she assumes he went back to getting dressed. “You didn’t communicate, you didn’t try to engage—Uh, no, not _engage_... You didn’t try to actively _participate_ in your relationship again. You ignored your obvious problems like they would fix themselves, which _you_ knew you were doing. Not to mention the fact that you didn’t even try talking about it with your friends until the Titanic was hitting the iceberg and there were no more lifeboats. So, if you two have sex, you’ll ruin your friendship because you two can’t have platonic sex like we can.”

There have been very few instances in their friendship where Lydia has heard Isaac string that many sentences together without being intoxicated. Though the last time was about his newfound love of the Beat movement, not an analysis of why her romantic relationship with Stiles ended the way it did.

Finally, Lydia glances up from her notes, her pen still twirling in her fingers, to see him standing further away from his laptop. He’s giving her this all-knowing look, the one he reserves for moments like this so it has a stronger impact. But before she can reply, he gestures down his body with his hand.

“What do you think?”

She inhales deeply through her nose and uses her pen to point at him. “If you want to wear the shirt, you have to change the jeans; the colors clash.”

Taking her advice with a terse nod, Isaac pulls his shirt over his head before disappearing from the camera’s view. Lydia taps the end of her pen against her notes, suddenly more focused on Isaac’s words than metabolic pathways. He’s not wrong, which is an annoying thought, but there’s still this itching part of her that questions how bad wanting Stiles like that is. Last time she felt like this, it ended happily; though the circumstances were different and they were different and they didn’t have a failure behind them. Lydia wouldn’t even be able to detach herself from it, she wouldn’t ever be able to have emotionless sex with Stiles.

In spite of that, it’s still a present and persistent thought in her mind.

“I mean, maybe you don’t even want to have sex with Stiles,” Isaac suggests, still out of the camera’s view. Briefly, Lydia does wonder if she had verbalized her thoughts without realizing. Her brow pinches as Isaac ducks his head back into the view of his camera. “Maybe you just need a new vibrator.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“You can’t get a motorbike.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll die,” Lydia casually states like she’s talking about the weather and not his exit from this mortal plane.

Stiles rolls his eyes even though he knows she can’t see him. “You don’t know that.”

“I know you.”

“If I asked Scott--”

“Ask your dad.”

“I’m not gonna ask my dad.”

She laughs through her nose. “Because you know I’m right.”

“Because he’ll make me sit through a PowerPoint presentation he and Melissa created about vehicular disasters,” Stiles petulantly retorts. “Not to mention all the informational movies he’ll show me. God, like remember that one he showed us about the kids who smoke pot for the first time then wind up setting themselves on fire in that weird Blair Witch Project inspired campsite.”

“I told you not to leave your bong on the kitchen counter.”

“You also told me not throw my jeans on your roof at your seventeenth birthday party and I ended up making $50.”

“That was also the night your dad came home to find you dancing on a table to Britney’s greatest hits.”

His brows furrow. “Yeah, I still don’t remember that part.”

“Isaac has the video saved on his laptop.”

“Whatever gets him through the long, lonely nights.”

When Lydia laughs that time, it resounds through the phone and brings a smile to his face. “I’ll let him know you said that.”

Stiles hums in agreement, his eyes drifting down to the now cold, decaf cup in his hands. It shouldn’t even be surprising anymore, because it happens every time. He’ll call Lydia on his break, ask her how her day’s going, and it’ll trail off from there. Today it’s different since he chose to sit out the front of the coffee house and the motorbike was parked almost right in front of him. Usually it just trails off into something he read before work or something she read and he’ll spend his break debating Lydia on something that most people would only spend a few minutes on. Yesterday, it was the mechanics behind a space elevator and whether Stiles would survive being trapped on Mars alone.

“What about an electric unicycle?”

“Stiles, I really don’t have enough time to write your eulogy right now.”

“What about in six months?”

“I’d have to check my calendar.”

“Makes sense, you’re a busy woman.”

“I already have the first four words prepared.”

Stiles takes a sip of his coffee, scrunching his nose at its temperature. “Wow, that was fast. Tell me.”

After an over exaggerated clearing of her throat, Lydia exhales. “ _He was an idiot_.”

There’s a pause as Stiles pretends to get choked up. “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry.”

Lately, he’s been regretting choosing to just call Lydia instead of using facetime because picturing the expression she’s wearing pales in comparison to actually being able to see it. This is one of those moments, where he has the faces of the people passing him by and the cars rushing by and not her.

A loud rap on the window behind him startles him more than he’ll admit to, a loud “ _shit!_ ” rolling off his tongue before he can stop it. Stiles turns his head to see Cora standing at the chairs by the window, exasperation etched on her face, her index finger tapping the non-existent watch on her wrist, and his knee-jerk reaction is to roll his eyes.

She stays there, pretending to wipe the inside of the window, as Stiles slowly stands. Every movement he makes is gallingly slow, just drawing out the amount of time he has left to talk to Lydia. He brings the coffee cup to his lips, but that’s only to hide his mouth so Cora doesn’t know he’s still speaking.

“Wanna see a movie tonight?” Stiles asks. Or really, whispers, like he’s afraid Cora can hear him through the glass.

Lydia lets out this heavy sigh that really makes him wish he could see her face. “I can’t. Dad and Grandma are in town, they’re taking me out to dinner.”

“God, I hope it’s not as morbid as last time. Like, really, ‘lively dinner conversation’ should consist of more than just discussing someone’s last will and testament,” Stiles utters, gaining an amused hum of approval from Lydia. He turns away from Cora to face the street instead, moving the cup away from his mouth as he does. “Do you need back up?”

“I think I’ll survive.”

His mouth opens, a reply on the tip of his tongue, when the door to the coffee house opens and a rag is thrown at his head. It secures itself to the back of his head and around his neck, its dampness leading to him scrunching his features in annoyance as he turns back to see a vexed Cora standing in the doorway.

“Tonight’s open mic night, I want to get out of here before the kazoo couple go on,” Cora states, folding her arms across her chest.

Stiles really doesn’t give a shit but he chooses to comply because he doesn’t want to spend the next three hours listening to Cora complain about him.

“Call me if you need me,” Stiles says before hanging up.

And it takes all of Stiles’ willpower to not drop his half-empty coffee cup on the floor when he walks back in to finish up his shift.

Also, he takes one look at the expression still etched on Cora’s face and decides he likes the current placement of his internal organs.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Lydia shows up at his apartment at around 10.

She doesn’t say anything so he doesn’t either.

She takes a seat on the couch in the empty space next to where he had been sitting, her eyes settling on his tv screen as she brings her knees up to her chest. His cautiousness is completely involuntary as he treads across the room, waiting for any sign from her. But Lydia doesn’t give away anything so he just sits down beside her and wraps his arm around her when she curls closer to him and her head finds solace on his chest.

The only sound in the apartment for the rest of the night come from the tv.

Stiles kind of just assumes that Lydia’s staying over, which she reinforces when he walks into his bedroom to find her on the side that used to be hers, wearing one of his flannels, curled on her side. He tries not to make any noise, even though there’s a definite possibility that she’s still awake, as he changes out of his clothes.

It’s only once he’s laying down next to her that she rolls over, her head coming to rest on his chest once again. Stiles’ gaze drifts down to her and her soft, sad features that make his heart ache, and all he can think is that there are very few times he’s seen her look this small.

And he fucking hates it.

He hates it every single time.

Her dad’s a tornado; the brunt of him is not necessarily initially visible but he still manages to be the most violent storm in nature, tearing through everything Lydia’s built up, her bravado and her conviction, before dissipating like nothing’s occurred.

Stiles has always wondered if it was possible to just prohibit him from visiting Lydia. If he could just make a “Douchebag Dad” ban that called out all the absent and asshole fathers who think that biology gives them some kind of entitlement to sporadically come back to raze their kids’ lives when they were barely a part of raising them.

Not that Lydia’s dad wasn’t there to raise her. He was, but only physically. Then he and Natalie got divorced and he became the guy who called every first Monday and second Thursday for seven minute increments, never actually asking her anything multifaceted enough to gain an understanding of the person she was becoming.

Obviously Stiles wasn’t privy to that piece of information until he and his dad moved into the Martins’, which always makes him feel like asshole because he stopped being her friend when she didn’t have enough who actually knew her. So Lydia spent a couple of years feeling like this and not having anyone who could pick up her pieces when she couldn’t.

Until him.

Which is why he’ll hold her like his embrace can glue the jagged pieces of her together and create something more whole than what she’s become accustomed to. Because she deserves more than consistently being broken down by someone who’s supposed to love her unconditionally.

When Lydia finally starts to cry, it’s a slow progression. There are little sporadic shakes of her body that would be barely noticeable if she wasn’t attached to his side, as she silently tries not to cry. But it trickles out. A ragged exhale here, an audible gulp there, his shirt begins to dampen so he tightens his arm around her.

Then she just... breaks.

And every part of him aches as her body shudders against his, knowing that he can’t do anything to fix this. He uses the fingers of his free hand to run through her hair, soothing and slow, actions that he hopes have a better effect than any words could.

So, she cries and Stiles pretends that seeing her like this doesn’t hurt and eventually, she just stops and her breathing evens out. But Stiles still keeps her clutched to his, her arm still wrapped across his waist, when they fall asleep.

 

 

* * *

 

 

When he wakes up, there’s coffee brewing and Lydia’s sitting an armchair, doing the crossword, and they don’t talk about the night before.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It turns out that Stiles only has one wish for his birthday: no surprise party.

Lydia calls him a hypocrite when he tells her because he was compliant in her birthday party. He shirks the blame to Scott and Allison, even though Lydia can just picture him giving them the idea to begin with. That eases the small amount of guilt she has over Isaac and Malia calling him Chiquitita.

When his birthday rolls around, Stiles throws his usual party: no set guest list, loud music, an abundance of alcohol and other illicit substances, and six pizzas that are devoured in minutes. The conversations diminish over time, the dancing changes to awkward grinding that doesn’t fit the tempo and Lydia ends up monopolizing the couch for the majority of the night.

Initially she had assumed that would mean she wouldn’t be faced with the possibility of being in a boring conversation.

What it actually meant was that the boring conversations would come to her but she’d at least be comfortable when they did.

Somehow, Lydia finds herself pretending to listen to this guy talk about protein shakes, or kale or... _something_. Honestly though, Lydia’s eyes are flitting between his eyes and his mouth and the rest of the party, never finding a solid place to land, and everything coming out of this guy’s mouth sounds like static to her. If anything, it makes her start compiling a list of every time she sat through a similar conversation with Jackson; she blames him for the in depth descriptions of proper exercises and workouts to have minimal body fat that still manage to take up valuable space inside of her brain.

Occasionally Lydia’s gaze falls to Stiles. He’s either leaning against the wall in the middle of an animated conversation, or sitting at the table with Scott and Allison playing yet another drinking game, or attempting to clean up the apartment before getting distracted by a new conversation. Her heart thumps heavily against her chest whenever she sees him talking a girl, where there’s very little personal space between them, when it looks like they’re going to kiss during a lull in their conversation. Lydia’s become familiar with other women checking Stiles out, it’s not exactly something new that started occurring after they broke up, but this situation is different and more intimate and makes her just stop. That’s when it hits her how unprepared she is to see Stiles with someone else because the mere hypothetical of him kissing another girl makes a pit begin to form in her stomach.

But it’s only been two months so that’s normal.

It doesn’t change her desire to push herself off the couch and move somewhere where she can’t see Stiles and can’t have a visual to accompany the hypotheticals multiplying in her head.

Lydia glides through the groups of people stuffed into the small space, subtly avoiding anyone she actually knows so she doesn’t have to explain why she’s going to the one place she knows she won’t be disturbed.

There’s just something comforting about being in his room, the musky, lingering smell of him soothing her more than she would ever actually admit to. His comforter’s in a pile on the mattress so Lydia straightens it out before she sits back against the cushions, which is her attempt to ignore how her mind slowly drifts into picturing Stiles laying back on his sheets with his hand around himself.

Lydia stays in his room for longer than she expects. She gets distracted on her phone: texting Isaac, texting Malia, texting Kira, scrolling through her feed, reading her emails. The muffled music filters into the room but she doesn’t think about leaving to re-join the party. She just likes being in here more, which is why she continues to stay even after the sound outside fades.

It’s only when the door opens that Lydia’s head snaps up, her attention drawn to the person standing in the doorway instead of the photo Isaac just sent her.

Stiles seems more taken aback than she is but manages to cover it. He doesn’t say anything as he walks towards her and falls onto the mattress, his face pressed against the comforter.

“Tired?” Lydia rhetorically asks, placing her phone on his bedside table as she asks.

He groans against the comforter before he begins to wriggle up so that he can press his face against the cushions. Lydia can’t help the way she smiles as she glance down at him, his hands coming up to rest underneath the pillow and push it further into his face. She can, however, stop herself from softly running her fingers through his hair. Instead, Lydia chooses to move down on mattress so she can be lying next to him.

Stiles’ head pops up at the movement and he rolls onto his side. “Why’d you disappear?”

As she meets his eyes, Lydia makes the decision to not be honest with him. “I had a headache.”

“Do you want some water?”

Lydia shakes her head, her smile briefly reappearing as she looks at him. “I’m okay.”

And it’s only then that she thinks that maybe she should have just left.

She’s lying on her old side of the bed and Stiles is lying on his and they’re there in the space that used to be theirs and she can’t stop thinking about the last time they found themselves in this position and how easy it could be to wreck their friendship by just giving in. All she has to do is be willing to risk it.

“So,” Lydia says, clearing her throat as she does. “Did Scott dedicate a dance to you?”

Stiles laughs, the sound filling the space around them and making warmth radiate through her. “He didn’t.”

“Not even a pelvic thrust?”

“Not even a _body roll_ ,” Stiles replies with a pout. “I’m starting to think he likes Allison more than me.”

“Is that so?”

“All of his pelvic thrusts and body rolls and Magic Mike inspired dance moves are hers now.”

Lydia presses her lips together to hold back a laugh as she pretends to reach for her phone. “I’m sure Isaac would dedicate a sprinkler to you if you said ‘please’.”

“I’ve seen his burlesque moves,” Stiles says with a scrunched nose and a dismissive wave of his hand. “I’m not impressed.”

A smile that’s too wide and too earnest and too exclusive to him spreads across her mouth as she looks at him. He mirrors it, though half his face is pressed against his pillow. The softness in his eyes makes her chest constrict because that look is hers, it’s dedicated solely to her and no one else.

And that realization makes it harder to pretend that she and Stiles can _just_ be friends.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He’s been on skype with his dad for the past hour, but he’s managed to keep the conversation revolving around him and Melissa and the station and Beacon Hills. It’s pretty impressive, he’s like the master deflector. Before his dad can even get a question out, Stiles has asked him another one, even though he has zero care for what streets they’ve decided to rename. It’s only when he leaves the couch to refill his coffee mug that his dad manages to squeeze in a question.

“What are your plans for the summer?”

Stiles drops his head against the counter and lets out a groan he knows his dad hears.

Everyone else has internships and plans and Stiles has... Well, he has plans but not concrete plans. In fact, they mostly just revolve around working at the coffee shop, hanging out with Scott, hanging out with Lydia, and probably spending a few weeks annoying his dad and Melissa in Beacon Hills.

Scott has actual plans. His dad should call Scott.

“I haven’t gone deaf yet, Stiles,” his father adds.

“God, I’ll be able to get away with so much when age wears you down,” Stiles states as he walks back to the couch.

“Don’t hold your breath, kid.”

Stiles takes an exaggeratedly long sip of coffee before finally setting the mug down. His dad’s still giving him that exasperated expression that Stiles has grown accustomed to; maybe his dad and Lydia practice their expressions together to hone them.

“I’m probably gonna visit you and Melissa, work until the smell of coffee makes me sick, hang out with Scott and Allison, and hang out with Lydia.”

His father pauses for a moment, his brow furrowing and his eyes narrowing. “Lydia?”

Of course, his dad’s gotta latch on to that.

“Yeah, Lydia,” Stiles affirms before raising his hand up out of shot of the camera. “About this tall. Strawberry blonde hair. Tone deaf. We once lived in the same house as her. Remember, she tried to make cupcakes for that school fair and those burnt, doughy paper weights ended up setting off the smoke detector.”

“Thank you, Stiles. I’m aware of who Lydia is,” his father retorts, the roll of his eyes is completely unsubtle. “I just didn’t think you two were talking after you chose my wedding as the location for your breakup.”

“Don’t be dramatic, Pops. We chose your reception.”

His father gives him another exasperated look.

“We’re friends,” Stiles lamely offers, even though he knows it’s way more complex than that.

There’s another silence before his dad solemnly nods his head, like he’s just processed the information he’s been given. “Okay, what are Lydia’s plans for the summer?”

_Shit._

Stiles has no idea.

He should probably know.

She reads him drafts of her assignments and he reads her his. They message each other daily. Last Friday, Lydia dragged him to watch this pretentious art film that Isaac recommended and he barely made any sarcastic remarks. He kind of felt indebted considering that Thursday she sat through the slam poetry night at his work and only made hushed criticisms he could hear; not that it’s his fault Cora got mono and he had to cover her shift instead of continuing the Breaking Bad rewatch with Lydia.

Actually, given how much time they’ve spent together over the past few months, he should definitely know whether she’s going to be in California for the summer.

“What are _your_ plans for the summer?” Stiles counters in lieu of actually answering.

His father sighs but starts telling him what he and Melissa have been discussing. It’s good, because Stiles can distract himself from thinking about whether or not he’s gonna see Lydia over the summer and why it feels like his heart is in his throat at the thought that he might not.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Lydia’s going to Boston for eight weeks during the summer.

She tells him while they’re waiting for their coffee order one afternoon. It’s in this fake blasé tone that Stiles can see straight through. As she goes into more detail about it, her nonchalant expression begins to drop and her eyes begin to light up and Stiles feels his stomach flip as he looks at her. There’s always been something about seeing Lydia enthusiastic and excited that makes him feel warm.

But he still ends up swallowing his scolding hot coffee to swallow down the feeling of his heart in his throat.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“How is it that you practically get ushered into bars but I’m given the third degree every time?” Stiles asks from behind her. He’s trying to slide his I.D. back into his wallet while manoeuvring through the small groups cluttering the empty space. His movements to avoid knocking into people are not nearly as graceful as Lydia, yet he manages to catch up to her and squeeze beside her.

“Because you have a fake I.D.,” Lydia replies straightforwardly, glancing over at him briefly before she returns to scouting the place for two empty seats. “And I’m hot.”

Even without looking over at him, she can tell he rolled his eyes. They’re not going through the motions or denying the need to attempt to salvage their relationship anymore’ they’re just being together and happy. They’re being Lydia and Stiles, two individual entities who have no interest in combining.

Which Lydia realizes is a blatant lie after they've decided to play pool and she’s watching Stiles take his shot. The sleeves of his flannel shirt are rolled up and every time he takes his shot, her eyes are drawn to the veins on his arm instead of where the cue ball moves.

They have different tactics for pool.

For Lydia, it’s all about angles and force; she thinks about the all the possibilities before she takes a shot. Stiles, on the other hand, attempts to make trick shots and ends up sending the cue ball across the room on more than one attempt.

And every time, she finds herself staring at his arms.

Not that it distracts her from winning their first game.

Or their second. He still has half the striped balls on the table when she sinks the black ball.

“Are you hustling me?” Stiles exasperatedly asks, pressing his palms against the edge of the pool table and leaning forward to look at her properly under the dull glow of the ceiling light swinging above the table.

“If I was hustling you, Stiles, you’d never know.”

“Oh, really?”

Lydia shrugs a shoulder and lines up her next shot before glancing up at him. “Orange 5, corner pocket.”

She can see him fighting the urge to roll his eyes as he meets her gaze. Lydia doesn’t look away from him as her cue stick connects with the cue ball and she sinks the orange 5 with a kink of her right eyebrow. Stiles doesn’t say anything, just removes one of his hands from the pool table to rub his chin as he exhales. His eyes move back to her, his head shaking softly as they do.

“Honestly, Lydia?” Stiles says as he takes his hand away from his chin. “I wouldn’t care if you were hustling me, because that was so hot.”

She really hopes her sharp intake of breath isn’t noticeable.

There’s no reaction on his face so she assumes it isn’t.

Still, Lydia doesn’t verbally respond to him, instead choosing to smirk and begin to rack the balls.

Lydia focuses on arranging the balls instead of glancing up at Stiles. If she wants to be friends with him again, if she wants any aspect of a platonic relationship between them, if she wants some semblance of normalcy, Lydia can’t keep thinking about having sex with him.

And she definitely can’t keep thinking about having sex with him twice. When they’re half-naked but too desperate to touch each other that they can’t risk spending any more time trying to take the rest of their clothes off. When his fingers are gripping her thighs and her hands are gripping his shoulders. When they’re fucking like nothing’s changed between them. When they’re fucking like it’s the only important action in universe.

It might be that thought process that leads to her only pushing the cue ball a fraction.

Or it could be that Stiles stretches and she catches a glimpse of the trail of hair disappearing into his jeans.

(It’s the latter, but that does lead her back to the former.)

“Are you trying to lull me into a false sense of security?” Stiles asks with a grin.

It’s clear when she meets his gaze that he hadn’t noticed her staring at him.

That’s good, though.

Especially since Lydia thinks she might have been staring at him in a manner reminiscent of the way a hungry cartoon character stares at a freshly baked pie. Ignoring her want to have sex with Stiles was easier before they had dated. She never found herself distracted because she knew that the minute she let her guard down, he’d mess with her car radio and make it impossible for her to turn it off or listen to anything other than melodramatic eighties pop ballads. That had been one of the longest weeks of her life but she refused to give in and go to the mechanic. Eventually Stiles fixed it; though Lydia is still positive that he only atoned because Scott told him to. She also had Isaac to distract her but he’s in New York so he’s useless in her current predicament.

She decides that her birthday is to blame for her current thought process.

“You show me your skills then act drunk so I think that I’m safe. Then you take me for all I’ve got,” he continues. He’s still grinning as he rounds the pool table to switch places with her.

Lydia ignores her thoughts and glances up at him momentarily before moving past him to lean against the wall. “It seems redundant to do that when we’re not betting money on the games.”

“I thought it would be chivalrous to not take all your money.”

“Haven’t we already established that I’m more proficient at this than you?”

“Aren’t you in most aspects of life?”

“Most?”

“Lydia, I think that I’m more adept at Jeep maintenance than you.”

“You put duct tape on a problem and hope for the best.”

Stiles concedes with a pithy nod. “Okay, well, I don’t think you’re more skilled at lacrosse than I am.”

“Are you?” Lydia incredulously asks.

His eyes narrow momentarily, a retort on the tip of his tongue, before he decides against it.

His first attempt to break them is pathetic.

So is his second.

After he scuffs the table on his third, Lydia sighs and leans her cue stick against one side of the table. She slips into the space between Stiles and the pool table without forewarning. He’s startled by the intrusion but he doesn’t attempt to push her away; actually, it almost feels like he momentarily leans into her.

“You’re going to hurt someone if you keep this up,” Lydia explains, turning her head so she can meet his gaze.

“Oh yeah,” Stiles sarcastically replies. “One of the four people here, not including us.”

The bar is significantly less crowded than when they first entered but Lydia still rolls her eyes. “You almost hit the guy over in the corner.”

“He barely noticed.”

“The bartender did.”

“I didn’t hit the bartender.”

“But you did almost break the bottle he was holding.”

“Admit it, you would have been impressed if I’d broken it.”

A giant grin is pulling his cheeks up and it’s hard to keep the indifferent expression on her face while staring at it. They spent so long just going through the motions. Having this levity between them makes her feel warm. It’s not the alcohol in her bloodstream or the temperature in the room, it’s them.

The corners of her lips tug upward faintly before she rolls her eyes and turns her attention back to the pool table. “Do you want to learn how to not hit someone while breaking?”

He mumbles a response and takes his hand off the cue stick so that Lydia can grip it before covering her hand with his. Lydia’s momentarily distracted by the warmth of his hand and his smell; his hoodie has nothing on him. She clears her throat, throws her hair over her shoulder and begins leaning forward. When Stiles moves with her, she has to remind herself that it’s a mistake to fuck him now that they’re friends again. She has to remind herself that the warmth she feels is due to them seemingly finding their way back to the dynamic they used to have, not because of Stiles’ close proximity.

That doesn’t stop her from pressing back against him under the guise of needing a better angle. Her hand presses against the table, Stiles’ soon following, as she moves the cue stick with her other. She feels Stiles exhale against her ear and that, partly, makes her press back against him again.

He knows what she’s doing. Of course he does, because he’s Stiles and she’s Lydia and they know each other better than anyone. Lydia knows from the way he meets her, pressing himself forward when she moves back. Lydia bites her tongue and ignores her desire to do it again, instead choosing to move forward with the cue stick. When Stiles follows, he surges forward into her and Lydia falters slightly, her eyes fluttering shut momentarily. The cue ball pathetically rolls along the table but she can’t make herself care; all she wants him to do is never stop pressing against her, she’s certain he could get her off just like this.

Then Stiles is next to her ear and his breath sends a chill down her spine and he’s still pressed against her and she can’t even remind herself that this is a mistake.

“Lydia?”

“Stiles?”

She has to swallow the lump in her throat as his lips move closer to her ear. He seems as nervous as she is, the only difference is that it’s evident with Stiles. “Bathroom?”

“Bathroom,” Lydia hastily confirms, dropping the cue stick on the table as she does.

She’s the first one to walk away.

It’s not like this is the first time they’ve done this in a bar; they have a routine, so she knows he’ll follow her in three minutes when it doesn’t look too suspicious.

He follows her in one. It’s probably suspicious but at that point, Lydia can’t find enough energy to care.

After Stiles locks the door, Lydia pulls him to her. Their hands grope at each other. Their lips move against each other. Lydia pushes him against the opposite wall, her fingers gripping the back of his hair, bringing him closer to her. He retaliates by grabbing her thighs to help wrap her legs around his hips. There’s friction when Stiles begins to move them that has Lydia biting his bottom lip in place of moaning, even though she’s well aware at that point that they’re far from inconspicuous.

He groans into her mouth when his opens for hers. There’s no technique or poetry to the way their tongues move together. It’s hunger and ferocity and need. Her legs are tight around his hips. His crotch is pressing against her as he turns them so she’s against the wall instead. Her fingers are gripping his hair. His hands are clutching her thighs and setting her skin alight. And it’s not enough.

She tugs on the strands between her fingers. It spurs Stiles to press her further against the wall so he can grind himself against her core, she thinks her eyes actually roll back in her head momentarily. Lydia has to pull away from his mouth to rest her forehead against his neck. They’re both breathless, the sounding reverberating in the room, but neither stop moving their hips.

She needs more though.

She needs him naked on her bed.

She needs _her_ naked on _his_ bed.

She needs him retracing every inch of her skin, taking advantage of every spot that makes her whimper and sigh and moan and call out his name like a curse.

 _She_ needs to retrace every inch of his skin, taking advantage of every spot that makes him whimper and sigh and groan and call out her name like a curse.

She needs more than she can get from a grungy bar’s unisex bathroom and she knows he needs it too from the expression on his face when their eyes meet.

“Jeep?” Stiles offers. Going to the Jeep means moving and neither of them want to stop doing what they’re doing.

“If we’re going anywhere...” Lydia begins, only to stop so she can hold back a moan. “Bed.”

He has an amused smirk that she would only find more exasperating if he stopped grinding against her. Lydia bites his neck in the place of kicking her heel against his ass.

“Unless you want to have mediocre, half-dressed sex in a bathroom,” Lydia continues, cocking an eyebrow to punctuate it.

Stiles briefly, and glibly, contemplates the options before his lips meet hers again. There’s still a ferocity, a need to be close to each other, but Lydia knows it’s Stiles trying to distract her as he stops grinding against her. The pads of his fingers trail up the backs of her thighs at a slow pace that makes her breathing stutter against his lips. It’s the contrast between their mouths and his hands that makes her reflexively buck against him.

He pulls away from her lips and smirks, his hands stopping underneath her ass. “ _Lydia_ , do you want to have mediocre, half-dressed sex in a bathroom?”

Her eyes narrow as his smirk grows. “ _Stiles_ , do you want to spend the night with your hand?”

“No, I did that last night.”

Lydia wants to roll her eyes but the image of Stiles with his hand wrapped around himself, on their dark gray sheets, making those noises that never quite leave his throat, has her heart thumping against her chest. She wants to know what he thinks about, if he thinks about her, if he thinks about her getting herself off to him. Her breathing falters again and she takes her hands away from his hair to push against his chest. Stiles seems to get the message; he helps her back down on to solid ground, his hands trailing up to rest on her hips.

When they walk out of the bathroom, neither of them are really thinking about being inconspicuous. Stiles does have his arms around Lydia’s waist as he walks behind her; Lydia knows that’s more to press against her than hide the bulge in his pants.

They make it as far as closing the doors to the Jeep before Lydia tugs him to her again. He leaves the key in the ignition, music faintly filtering into the space, so he can manoeuvre them into the backseat. It’s teeth and tongues and want and wandering hands that never find purchase. Eventually, she’s straddling him, her skirt bunched up at her hips, while his hand trails between her thighs. Lydia keeps his flannel gripped in her hands as he fingers her, never lets his lips travel any further than her own until she comes.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Wait, you two had sex?” Scott asks like it’s the most astonishing piece of information he’s heard all year.

“Yeah,” Stiles answers with this feigned nonchalance he’s perfected. “Then we watched Breaking Bad until we fell asleep.”

He kind of wants to tell Scott that Lydia fell asleep with her head on his chest and that he listened to her breathe for like five minutes when he first woke up and that they had sex twice in the morning before she left to meet Allison at yoga.

But he decides against it.

“What does this mean?”

“It means I got laid.”

“Dude.”

“I don’t know, Scott,” Stiles says with this vague gesticulation of his hands. “I guess it means that Lydia and I can still have really exceptional sex.”

Scott gives him this exasperated look that’s eerily reminiscent of the Sheriff’s. It freaks him out a little because clearly the McCall-Stilinski combined family unit is starting to influence each other and he wonders what he’s going to get from Melissa; maybe his sarcasm will reach supernatural levels. Stiles covers his alarm with a self-satisfied smile.

Because, honest to god, he has no idea what him and Lydia having sex means.

Obviously he wants it to mean something good, something that doesn’t lead to them not talking or them being awkward around each other.

And he kind of wants to know whether it’s going to happen again because he wants it to happen again.

But, he also wants them to be able to keep doing everything they were doing before and _not_ have it be awkward because they had sex.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Allison’s been staring at her since Lydia told her in the same indifferent tone she uses to say they’re out of milk. Granted, she and Stiles having sex is a new facet of their friendship that Lydia wasn’t expecting to explore so soon after reaffirming their friendship but it’s not exactly staggering information. Allison doesn’t look staggered though, she has a much more analytical expression that Lydia notices without having to glance back up from her textbook.

Eventually the silence begins to vex her; she’d even take Stiles rapping his fingers on table at this point. Lydia puts the cap back on her highlighter, mashes her lips together and links her fingers as her gaze meets Allison’s.

“Yes?” she asks. It comes out a little more condescending than she intends but that doesn’t even faze Allison.

“You can't have sex with an ex you still have feelings for,” Allison asserts, her brows knitting together.

Lydia hums like she’s actually considering it before she glances back down at her textbook.

“There’s no way you can have casual, emotionless sex with Stiles and not have it end catastrophically.”

A sardonic laugh falls from Lydia’s lips before she can’t stop it. “It’s sex, Allison, not an eruption of Mount Vesuvius.”

Allison gives her a disbelieving look that makes Lydia want to roll her eyes. She doesn’t.

“Anyway, Stiles and I aren’t going to have casual, emotionless sex. Those transgressions were the result of mutual dry spells and, _admittedly_ , some built up sexual tension, which is perfectly natural given the duration of our relationship,” Lydia continues with a vague wave of her hand. “But it’s not like it’s going to become a habitual occurrence. Stiles and I are capable of still being friends without sex being an issue.”

Which Lydia resolutely believes to be a certainty.

At least until she’s sitting on the couch with Stiles later that evening, her legs draped over his, listening to his character analysis of Gus Fring. She’s absently playing with the popcorn in the bowl on her lap as she watches him with this mixture of ambivalence and amusement that’s reserved for him. Stiles gestures to something on the tv screen like it’s evidence in his analysis; honestly, Lydia hasn’t been properly watching the episodes for a while.

When Stiles had shown up at Allison’s, Lydia braced herself for a discussion about the ramifications of them having sex. The word ‘catastrophe’ had bounced around in her head as Stiles walked into the apartment then quickly dissipated when he started verbally contemplating what show they’d binge-watch next. Lydia didn’t have an overwhelming desire to interrupt him so they could talk about them having sex so she sat on the couch and contemplated with him as he started to make popcorn.

But slowly, sex has been encroaching her thought process.

It doesn’t help that one of Stiles’ hands is resting on her knee, his fingers idly trailing along her skin.

In fact, it’s only when his fingers move higher in their trailing that Lydia realizes she should express her thoughts.

She puts the bowl on the coffee table, a movement that gains her Stiles’ focus but only because he assumes she’s going to the bathroom again. His fingers stop moving but his hand doesn’t leave her leg. He’s giving her this questioning look; he did stop his in-depth character analysis after all, he was kind of expecting that Lydia was going to say or do something other than silently scrutinize him.

Allison’s words are the first things that enter Lydia’s mind as she meets his brown eyes. It was an accurate conclusion that her best friend reached; that the ramifications could be catastrophic if she and Stiles have sex, regardless of whether it’s casual or emotionless, though Lydia firmly believes that the latter could never be true.

Her brows knit together as Lydia watches Stiles watch her. She has to say something or they’ll just be sitting there in silence staring at each other while in the background, Gus Fring walks out of a hospital room with half his face missing. But the words are stuck in her throat because Allison’s voice is echoing in her head.

 _Catastrophe_ , noun. A final, decisive event or conclusion, usually an unfortunate one; a disastrous end.

Worth 18 points in Scrabble.

How to use the word in a sentence: Lydia and Stiles habitually having sex then separating due to unrequited romantic feelings emerging would be a catastrophe.

But as she’s looking at Stiles, as his eyes dart down to her lips when she runs her tongue along the bottom one, as she feels her heart begin to beat harder in her chest because Stiles’ hand is gripping her knee, she makes her decision.

Lydia would rather be buried underneath pyroclastic surges and ashfall deposits than safe in Misenum anyway.

“I think we should have sex,” Lydia says. She’s careful with her choice of words, even though she’s certain this is what she wants.

There’s a brief pause where Stiles just stares at her with this blank expression that she can’t see past. That unnerves her a little because she can usually decipher what he’s thinking; all she can see when she looks at him is a wall and she wonders how often he sees that when he’s trying to decipher her thoughts.

What unnerves her more is the possibility of ruining this dynamic they’ve developed. They’re friends, but they’re also more than that. Lydia doesn’t even consider glancing at their tumultuous relationship history because, while it is important to what they are now, they reached this friendship almost in spite of what they were. And maybe what they are now is something that can be okay with sporadic sex but falters at even the chance of habitual sex. It wouldn’t be casual or emotionless, because Lydia doesn’t think either of them would be able to do that with each other even though they’ve done it with others before. She wants to be able to have exclusive, habitual sex with her best friend and still be able binge-watch a tv show with him a few hours later.

And she wants to tell Stiles this but she doesn’t want it to feel like she’s manipulating him.

So she waits and she watches him stare at her and she tries to gain some idea of what he’s thinking.

The credits for the episode begin to roll when Stiles softly tugs her towards him. She adjusts herself so that she’s straddling him, her hands coming to rest on his chest as his find solace on her thighs. Underneath the pads of her fingers, Lydia can feel the fast thumping of his heart and she knows hers is beating at the same pace.

“Just now?” Stiles asks, his wall finally dissolving enough for her to see his hesitation. Because Stiles doesn’t know that she doesn’t just want him now because she’s bored and they’re running out of episodes to watch. He doesn’t know that she wants more of him because it feels better to heal herself when she’s with him and he’s healing himself with her. He doesn’t know that she craves their familiarity because no one else can make her feel the way he does and the way their relationship does.

And Lydia doesn’t know how to verbalize that so she smiles at him instead. It’s a small, warm smile as her hands trail up his chest to rest on his shoulders. Stiles understands the hint, leaning forward and lifting his arms so Lydia can slip his flannel off. He keeps his eyes on hers as she brings her hands to his cheeks, the warmth underneath her fingers making her smile remain.

“No.”

It’s one word but she has a feeling he understands everything she left unsaid from the way his eyes soften before he kisses her.

 

 

* * *

 

 

They decide they’re not going to let their friends know about the beneficial aspect of their friendship.

Or really, Lydia gives him reasons why they shouldn’t, which Stiles concurs with. Though he thinks he ultimately agrees because she’s wrapping her hand around his dick and he’d agree to anything she suggests when she’s touching him.

(He’d probably agree to anything she suggested regardless of the placement of her hand.)

 

 

* * *

 

  

There’s something incredibly hot about clandestineness.

Back in Beacon Hills, when Stiles and Lydia were a secret because their parents were still together, it was kind of exhausting to sneak around. Stiles wanted to hold Lydia, and kiss her, and openly go to prom with her, and basically do everything with her that Scott and Allison could. But he couldn’t.

Now, though?

Now, it’s different.

And Stiles can’t explain it.

There’s just something hot about watching Lydia, her hair flipped behind her shoulders, her lips mashed together, her hands pressed against his chest, as she rises and sinks down on him.

It might have something to do with the fact that they’re both trying to not make any noise because Allison’s walking around the apartment.

Allison, who Lydia said had classes then work that afternoon so she wouldn’t come back to the apartment until after 9.

Honestly though, Stiles is just happy they decided to move to the bed because otherwise Allison would have been greeted with them on her couch or on the floor or against the wall. She also might have seen his ass, which probably would have changed their dynamic.

He’s also content to silently watch Lydia, his hands gripping her hips and guiding her movements. At least until one of her hands leave his chest to rub her clit and she bites down her bottom lip. Stiles pushes himself upright, nearly throwing her off balance as he does, and brings his hands up to splay across her back. The new angle makes Lydia break her silence, a soft cry falling from her lips before she can muffle it against his shoulder.

“Lydia?” Allison asks, her voice cutting through what was once an otherwise silent apartment.

Lydia pulls her head away from his shoulder with a silent groan, bringing the hand that was rubbing her clit to cover Stiles’ mouth as she does. “Allison, I didn’t know you were home.”

Even covered by her hand, Stiles is sure Lydia can see the smirk he’s wearing.

“I wanted to drop off my book bag before work,” Allison replies, her voice growing louder as her footsteps draw closer. “Are you okay? I heard something.”

“I stubbed my toe.”

“Do you need ice?”

Stiles’ smirk grows until Lydia meets his eyes and gives him a look that Stiles roughly translates into ‘ _I will destroy you_ ’. Which he really doesn’t doubt, so he stops and instead pretends like he’s not there, literally inside of Lydia, as she lies about a fake injury to his best friend’s/step-brother’s girlfriend.

“I’m fine.”

“ _Okay_ ,” Allison cautiously says before her footsteps retreat. “Do you want me to get anything after work?”

Her eyebrows furrow and her chest heaves and Stiles has no idea where to rest his eyes so he settles on hers.

“We’re out of soy milk,” Lydia answers after a moment.

“Text me if we need anything else.”

“Okay.”

They both stay still in silence as the front door opens and shuts, but neither of them move until they’re sure Allison’s gone. And maybe given the interruption and almost getting caught, they should just stop and try again later when they’re sure Allison’s not going to walk in on them. But Stiles is still so goddamn hard inside of her, and Lydia is still so goddamn warm and wet, and goddamn all he wants to do is move.

Her hand leaves his mouth to rest around his neck as she leans forward to kiss him. It’s soft at first, almost lazy, before she licks into his mouth. Then it’s feverish, her hips beginning to move again while their tongues move against each other. When she breaks away, it’s to give him this look that makes him seriously question whether human beings actually can spontaneously combust.

Lydia’s hands move backwards to press against the mattress while Stiles slides his back to grip her hips. His hands bring her hips down to meet his with every thrust. The sound of their skin slapping together makes him groan and drop his head to her chest, his mouth on her nipple.  Lydia cries out, her eyes screwed shut as she grips the sheets between her fingers, and Stiles picks up his speed, wanting to hear her make that sound again and again and _again_.

(He wants to hear it for longer than just now, but he’ll take everything she’ll give him.)

Stiles fucks into her at an unyielding pace that has them both emitting a litany of obscenities and each other’s names. It takes every shred of willpower he has to not come when Lydia falls forward and grasps the back of his hair, tugging it hard and letting out a soft moan in his ear when she does. He moves his mouth to her other nipple, flicking it with his tongue and rolling it between his teeth.

The noise Lydia makes when she comes echoes through the room and pierces through him. Stiles has to drop his forehead against her chest, too overwhelmed by her and them and this, when he tumbles over the edge after her.

Lydia falls back against the mattress when Stiles pulls out. He watches as her eyes slowly and briefly droop as she’s settling herself comfortably.

And he still feels completely overwhelmed by her.

And that fucks with him more than he expects.

Because they’ve had sex countless times before and he’s seen her after sex and nothing about this should be overwhelming, but it is.

Stiles decides to ignore it, optimistically hoping that it will fade away.

“Hey, Lydia?” he asks as he’s settling down next to her.

“Mmm?”

“Soy milk is imposter milk.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Scott’s snaps to her are usually of highlighted pages of a textbook or inside jokes or dogs from the shelter he works at or, on occasion, Allison.

So, imagine Lydia’s surprise as she’s going through the recent snaps he’s sent her and right after a photo of a textbook page captioned ‘ _WTF SOS_ ’ is a 10 second video of Stiles twerking in the middle of the produce section of a grocery store.

Lydia winds up re-watching Scott’s story five times just for those 10 seconds of Stiles. Every time she notices something new, like how he’s situated in front of the eggplants and how Scott’s trying not to laugh, but each time she comes to the same conclusion: _why is that attractive_?

 

**To: Stiles Stilinski                              Today 5:09 pm**

**You should come over.**

 

**To: Stiles Stilinski                              Today 5:11 pm**

**Pants optional.**

 

 

* * *

 

 

As it draws closer to the end of the school year, they start spending more time with each other. Lydia basically becomes a constant in his apartment, which she likes to claim is because he’s so much closer to her classes than her apartment is, even though both of them (and Allison, and Scott) see straight through. Not that she thinks Stiles cares given the expression that settles on his face every time he comes home to find Lydia sitting on his couch, fresh from a shower, wearing one of his t-shirts, with a textbook in her lap and a highlighter in her hand.

Some nights she sits on the armchair, re-reading her notes, while Stiles avoids his altogether, choosing to settle back against the couch and invest hours into a video game he’s already beaten three times before. Occasionally, when the crinkle between her eyebrows stays for longer than five minutes, Stiles pauses his game and pulls her notes away from her. Lydia pretends to protest but it always ends the same way, with Lydia naked and Stiles eating her out like it’s the sole reason he was put on this earth.

Some nights they just sit together on the couch and eat dinner and watch pointless tv shows that they’re not invested in enough to pay attention. Usually they move onto quizzing each other instead, which Stiles sporadically tries to turn into strip quizzing when he knows that he has six items of clothing on and she only has three or four.

“Both socks count as one,” Lydia says, after finally throwing the flannel she borrowed at him.

“I have two feet therefore two socks. You have two breasts but only one bra,” Stiles replies, using his free hand to motion to the black bra she’s wearing as his other takes off one of his socks.

“My bra has two straps and two cups, so I could choose to slide down one and only show one breast.”

Stiles contemplates this briefly, pursing his lips, his eyes darting between her breasts and her eyes before landing on her face. “Well, can you slide the left cup down first? ‘Cause that’s the better breast.”

His mouth spreads into this wide shit-eating grin as Lydia takes the pillow from behind her back and throws it at him, despite the fact that they both know he’d never be able to actually pick a favorite. Stiles raises his hands in defence as he closes the distance between the two so he can hover over her. They end up fucking on the couch, with Stiles’ lips on her right breast and Lydia’s heels digging into his ass.

There's this one afternoon where Stiles lets Lydia use his back as a canvas. She sits against his ass, her legs on either side of his hips, and draws the structure of every carbohydrate she can think of. He folds his arms under his head as a makeshift pillow, occasionally propping his chin up so he can look at her as he asks her questions about what she’s tracing. With every few questions, his voice gets hoarser and the movement of her fingers gets slower. But it’s only once she’s changed to the structures of lipids and she’s tracing oleic acid along his spine that he finally does what she’s known he wanted to for fifteen minutes; his grinding against the mattress would probably be subtler if she wasn’t straddling him.

And another night where Lydia blows him before Jeopardy, which is partly the result of a twenty minute study break that just consisted of making out and dry humping and partly an underhanded tactic guided by the competition they’ve started that, annoyingly, Stiles is winning. The tactic comes back to bite her in the ass halfway through the episode when Stiles has two fingers inside of her and his lips on her neck. But by the end, they’re both on the carpet and Lydia’s more focused on the feeling of Stiles’ carpet against her knees and his hands sliding up to her breasts than what’s happening on the tv screen. Stiles swears the next night that his dick twitches when he hears the Jeopardy theme song in what he declares as a “weird Pavlovian response”.

Lydia wants to believe her own lie but she can’t.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Every time someone says ‘time is just a philosophical concept’, Stiles rolls his eyes; it’s a totally involuntary reaction, like how both eyes blink when the cornea of either eye is touched.

Usually the person saying it is stoned or trying to fill the silence or is a boasting pseudo-intellectual. The last one is always more entertaining when Lydia’s with him; she starts discussing eternalism and philosophical presentism then, with a belittling smile, asks for their opinion like she doesn’t already know the person is full of shit. Stiles always sits back and opts out of the discussion because, even though he knows enough from listening to Lydia to form his own argument, it’s way more fun to watch Lydia verbally annihilate someone with a smile. He knows he’s an asshole for it and that he probably shouldn’t find that aspect of her endearing but he always has.

They’re sitting on a couch at this party Danny invited them to because it’s the beginning of summer and everyone deserves to get plastered before they go off and do whatever it is they’re doing. Stiles is still doing nothing aside from working and hanging out with his family so this is like an indication of what’s to come; the only difference is that Lydia most likely won’t be beside him for the rest of them. Scott has many endearing qualities – actually all of his qualities are endearing to Stiles – but he can’t pass judgment on a person with the finesse that Lydia can and he probably wouldn’t anyway.

The guy sitting on the chair next to him, the one who started the conversation, eventually wanders off to ‘find his friend’ when Lydia starts discussing the growing block view. Stiles gives him an absent-minded wave goodbye as he brings his solo cup to his mouth to hide his growing smirk. With a content sigh, Lydia leans back against the couch, her shoulder nudging Stiles’ when she does.

“That was mean,” he says with a laugh.

The corners of Lydia’s mouth tug upwards in an earnest, happy smile. “I know.”

And it kind of hits him then just how much he’s going to miss her.

They’ll message each other and facetime and do everything they normally do, but she’s still going to be on the other side of the country while he’s here, doing nothing for the entirety of his summer break. Well, nothing in comparison to Lydia and Scott and Allison and Danny and almost every one of his friends who decided to spend their summer being productive and furthering their education.

So, he’ll be here or in Beacon Hills and Lydia won’t be.

For eight weeks.

Stiles wants to tell her that he’ll miss her; the only problem is he has no idea how to without it sounding ridiculous. It’s eight weeks and they’ll still talk like they normally do, only Lydia will be in a different state.

So, he says nothing.

Lydia glances over at him, meeting his gaze. There’s this look in her eyes that Stiles can’t totally crack but it makes his heart thump a little harder. Briefly, Stiles thinks she must know what he’s thinking and what he’s not saying and why he’s content to just sit and not talk while the music from the speakers surrounds them. Then she blinks and he can’t see a damn thing.

It’s only when Lydia places her cup on the end table beside the couch, stands and holds out her hand to him that he definitively knows that she knows what he’s thinking.

Stiles leaves his cup with hers before he slips his hand into hers, letting their finger entwine as Lydia leads them through the throng of people in the room. It’s chaotic and loud and a little suffocating; he misses the Beacon Hills parties where he, at least, felt a little suffocated by familiar and usually friendly faces. The only upside of it not being a Beacon Hills party is that Stiles and Lydia can walk around with their fingers interlinked and not worry about gossip. Sure, Scott and Allison and Danny are around somewhere but they don’t gossip and they’re too preoccupied to pay attention to what Stiles and Lydia are doing anyway.

Which is good because Lydia ends up pulling him into the first room with an open door. Judging by the size and the fact that coat hangers rattle when Stiles shuts them door behind him and Lydia steps backwards to accommodate him, he realizes it’s a closet.

There’s this part of him that doesn’t want to say anything, doesn’t want to ruin whatever’s happening by opening his mouth and letting a smartass comment out.

But there’s another part of him that does and it wins out.

“You wanna play ‘Seven Minutes in Heaven’?”

Lydia trails one hand up his arm, delicate, slow and precise, until she reaches the hair on the back of his neck. Her other hand sneaks under his t-shirt, her nails lightly scratching up and down with no real purpose other than to make him shudder. And he does, his breathing becoming heavy as she twirls strands of hair between her fingers. It’s probably not even her objective, but all it does is remind him how easy it is for her to ruin him and how much he’s gonna miss her when she’s gone.

The hand underneath his shirt rakes down to his jeans, her fingers tucking into the space between the fabric and his skin, so she can pull him closer to her. Lydia leans up to his ear, her breath on his lobe making his own breathing hitch, before she whispers, in a tone that is way too innocent and way too sweet to be coming from her lips; “If that’s all you’ve got in you.”

And _nope_.

Stiles is 98% sure the noise he emits could be classified as a growl, which he knows makes Lydia smirk without having to actually see her face. He closes what little space is between them, his head ducking down to capture her lips as her arms slide up to rest around his neck. One of his hands drops to her lower back as the other presses into the space beside her head, trying to find purchase on the wall. What happens is Stiles unwittingly walks Lydia into the rack of clothes with his hand abruptly falling on her shoulder as he squawks in surprise, the sound muffled by her mouth, and almost loses his balance. Lydia just laughs against his lips, a sound too light-hearted to not embed itself in his memory, and walks them back to where they started before she turns and tugs him to the door with her.

For a moment, Stiles gets caught up in their kiss; the way their mouths move together, the way it manages to be soft and feral and everything and not enough all at the same time. Then Lydia drags his bottom lip between her teeth and he ruts against her and realizes he needs to be closer to her. His hands drop down to grip her thighs and lift her up, her legs hooking around his waist when he does. And, god, there’s this brief second where Stiles actually internally debates the merits of dry humping that happens to coincide with Lydia grinding against him and letting out these noises that have him half-hard and groaning.

But then the reminder hits him that there’s only a finite amount of time left to adore Lydia Martin before she’s in Boston and he’s relying on everything else to make him feel at least half as good as she does.

His fingers work to unbutton her shirt as he rocks his hips into hers. But it’s only when Lydia’s hand trails up to tug on his hair as she sighs against his mouth that Stiles has to stop himself from just ripping the shirt open; last time he did that, Lydia took revenge on one of his t-shirts.

Lydia arches her chest forward and her arms droop to her sides as Stiles slides her shirt off her shoulders. The material falls to the floor and he tries to kick it away so he doesn’t end up standing on it and doing damage that will come back to bite his wardrobe in the ass. However, doing that is infinitely more difficult when Lydia has her hands in his hair and has his face pressed against her breasts. Not that Stiles is complaining; if he’s gonna suffocate to death, Lydia’s cleavage is definitely #2 on his ‘Top Five Places to Asphyxiate’ list.

“Fuck, you gotta wear a bra with a front clasp next time we’re in a cramped space,” Stiles says, his voice stifled by her breasts, as he tugs the cups down.

“Planning in advance _is_ the key to spontaneity,” Lydia sardonically replies, reaching a hand behind her to unclasp her bra.

Stiles grinds his hips up into hers when she takes her bra off and she whimpers, her legs tightening around his waist. One of his hands covers her breast, his thumb gliding over her nipple as he does, while his mouth drops to the other. Lydia’s sigh echoes in the space, muting the outside music, and Stiles can’t stop himself from rolling his hips into her a little harder.

Strands of his hair are tugged between her fingers as he takes her nipple between his teeth. Stiles takes his hand off the door to slide between them, pulling his hips away from her as far as her legs will allow. His hand skims between her thighs and into the lace he finds there, two fingers slipping inside of her as Stiles begins kissing his way up her chest. A hand wraps around his arm before her head falls back against the door, her chest arching into him as it does. He uses the heel of his hand to grind against her clit while his fingers move, the noises she makes and her fingers digging into his bicep spur him to go faster, harder, hit the spot that makes her utter his name like a prayer. The noises Lydia lets fall from her lips infuse themselves in his ears, much like the feeling of her in his hair when his other hand kneads her breast infuses itself into his memory.

“ _Stiles._ ”

The pace slows but Stiles keeps moving his fingers when she comes, kisses his way up to the spot behind her ear, keeps squeezing her breast and running his thumb over her nipple. But it’s only when she tugs his head back so she can kiss him, deep and unhurried, that he finally slips them out, his hand resting on her thigh instead. And, _god,_ he’s so content to make out with Lydia in this closet until the party ends but then he leans into her and the bulge in his jeans connects with her again.

Stiles groans into her mouth, his internal debate about dry humping reasserting itself in his mind, before he rubs himself against her. It’s Lydia who ends up making a decision, dropping her hand between them to fish around in his front pocket but the friction that creates isn’t helping. In an attempt not to focus on it, Stiles’ hand leaves her breast to unbutton his jeans, which he does as Lydia finally takes the condom out, and push them and his boxers down his legs.

Her lips pull away from his, all of Lydia’s concentration seemingly placed on ripping the foil packet open and rolling it on him and moving her underwear to the side to line him up with her entrance. He drops his head back down to her breast, taking one of her nipples into his mouth. When Lydia’s hand sneaks under the back of his shirt and her nails begin lightly scratching against his skin, Stiles takes the hint. He pushes into her heat and they both groan at the feeling.

One of his hands presses against the door to brace him as he lifts one of her thighs higher on his waist. Lydia’s head falls to his shoulder as they start creating a rhythm that’s faster and harder and a little more fervent than usual. This isn’t the last time they’re going to have sex before she leaves but, for some reason, it feels like it is. It feels like, in this moment, everything is on the line and they have to show each other everything they can’t say.

So they do.

Lydia twists her hand into his flannel while the other clings to his arm. His heart pounds against his chest when she stutters out his name and he keeps slamming into her, wanting to hear her say it again and again until he’s sure it’s permanently engrained in his memory.

(Two years in a relationship; it’s permanently engrained in his memory. But he still wants to hear it. He just wants to hear it in more than his memories.)

“Oh, fuck,” he groans before his hand slips between them to circle her clit.

Their heavy breaths and the sound of their skin slapping together bounce around the confined space, drowning out anything that isn’t him or her or them or this.

When Lydia clenches around him, Stiles can’t hold himself back. He rests his forehead in the valley between her breasts, clutching her thigh as he comes. Lydia tumbles over the edge after him, her fingers grabbing onto t-shirt.

They stay there for a while, holding each other, after Stiles pulls out.

Lydia’s fingers softly comb through his hair.

His skim along her skin.

Eventually their mouths meet again and this time, it’s different. It’s soft and warm and nothing like a kiss that ‘friends with benefits’ are supposed to share.

And they don’t move away from each other. They don’t stop kissing. They forget that there’s more outside the door than them until Stiles’ phone starts to buzz and reality comes back into play.

Stiles lowers Lydia down onto the floor, his hands lingering on her legs before he finally backs away so he can bend down and put his pants back on without bumping into her. He still does, but it’s not as bad as if he was right in front of her.

Even without checking, Stiles knows who called him, but he waits until he’s buttoned his jeans to check. He fishes his phone out of his back pocket and nods to himself when he sees Scott’s name.

“Scott?” Lydia intuitively asks.

Stiles turns on his phone’s flashlight like Lydia needs it to be well-lit to clasp her bra. “Yeah, he wanted to know where we went.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That we went to fuck in a closet.”

Lydia gives him a pointed look as she reaches down for her shirt that makes him smile. When she meets it with an affectionate roll of her eyes, Stiles knows his heart begins thumping a little harder against his chest. Harder than he wants to admit but harder than he can ignore.

It’s only after she’s buttoned her shirt, when one hand is on the doorknob and the other is on his wrist, that she turns her attention back to him. There’s a conflicted expression on her face that he knows she wishes wasn’t as blatant as it is. So, Stiles turns off his flashlight and the darkness of the closet envelopes them once again.

“Can you drive me to the airport on Sunday?”

And he knows he shouldn’t pause. That this isn’t a moment to pause. That Lydia needs him to not pause.

So, he doesn’t.

“Yeah.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Stiles stays at Lydia and Allison’s on Saturday night. It starts out with the four of them sitting around, talking about everything they can think of, before Scott and Allison disappear into her room because they’re “tired”. Eventually, after continuing their discussion about the space elevator, Lydia and Stiles decide to move into her room because there are two episodes left in their rewatch and her bed’s way more comfortable than the couch.

Honestly, Stiles relishes in watching the episodes, relishes in drawing out the time they have left together before she leaves. He thinks Lydia does too from the way she looks over at him every so often.

It’s different when they have sex that night. It’s not like the closet; it’s delicate and seamless and _slow_. The rest of the world is rapidly moving outside the apartment but they’re not. They’re in their own world; it’s just Lydia and Stiles, two separate entities connecting in the dark, and they don’t need to rush.

In the morning, Stiles pours coffee into a thermos and loads Lydia’s luggage into the back of the Jeep for her. They listen to Top 40s and Lydia tells him more about the program and neither of them acknowledge the way Stiles slows down when the traffic light turns yellow, instead of pressing down on the accelerator to beat it like he normally does.

Stiles carries her luggage for her, ignoring her initial objection because he needs to be doing something or else his hands will be in his back pockets and he’ll be trying to stop himself from saying something idiotic that could risk this absolutely platonic beneficial relationship they have going.

He walks with her until he can’t go any further. Briefly, as Lydia steps in front of him, Stiles wonders if his emotions are evident in his expression. His hands start to slide into his back pockets before he stops himself and hugs her instead. If his emotions weren’t evident on his face, they definitely are in his hug. It’s not a “see you soon, send me awesome snapchats, have a good time” kind of hug, it’s a “without you around, the next few weeks are gonna be monochromatic but I don’t know how to effectively verbalize that” kind of hug. He buries his head in her hair, the scent of her coconut shampoo forming a lump in his throat, as his arms wrap around her lower back.

“So, uh, don’t lose your ‘r’s, Martin,” Stiles says, before he pulls away from her.

“Don’t be a college student cliché this summer, Stilinski,” Lydia replies with a smile, before leaning up to press a kiss to his cheek.

Instead of hugging her again like he wants to, Stiles sticks one hand into his back pocket and tries to give her an earnest smile. It probably doesn’t work but Lydia doesn’t say anything. Every step she takes towards her plane puts a dent in his superficial smile, but he still tries to beam at her when she turns around to wave goodbye. He stands in the same spot until he can’t see her anymore and he doesn’t have to pretend that saying goodbye to her doesn’t form a pit in his gut.

It’s as he’s walking back to the Jeep that he realizes there’s a fourth reason why he hates the statement ‘time is just a philosophical concept’.

Lydia’s going to be in Boston for eight weeks.

And Stiles is going to feel every second – past, present, and future – of it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you like it? Did you love it? Don't forget to leave kudos, or a comment! Please spare my heart if you hated it though.
> 
> If you did like or love it, I'm hoping you like the next chapter. But you might want to take a break before you carry on. 35k+ words is a lot to get through in one sitting.


	2. ii

Mark Twain once stated: “In Boston they ask, ‘how much does he know?’ In New York, ‘how much is he worth?’ In Philadelphia, ‘who were his parents?’”

When Lydia’s plane lands, she feels like she knows frustratingly less.

Of her six-hour flight, Lydia spent two and a half hours reading about macromolecules, another two and a half hours reading one of the books Allison loaned her, and half an hour of a pure dissection of the past few months with Stiles; not that she hadn’t _already_ been doing that, it’s just that she actually focused solely on that for those thirty odd minutes before the plane finally landed on the tarmac.

It’s ridiculous, Lydia concludes as she’s waiting for her cab, to already miss Stiles.

Just like it was ridiculous that she actually, _briefly_ , considered asking him if he would come with her. On _three_ separate occasions.

The first being when Stiles accompanied her to the grocery store a week ago. He was pushing his cart a little too fast around the produce section so he could jump on and ride it while she chose between different fruit. This was as he explained his annoyance about Scott missing another Star Wars movie night, which quickly descended into what could only be described as a heartfelt eulogy for Han Solo. Inexplicably, Lydia found herself watching him with adoration that made her breath hitch and she quickly tried to rectify it by fixating on the tomatoes, which she pretended to scrutinize for longer than she’d care to admit. At no point did Stiles actually acknowledge this, though that might have had more to do with almost colliding with a geriatric couple who were just trying to buy some bananas. Still, in that brief moment before her focus purposely shifted, Lydia debated whether she should ask him to come with her to Boston, because the reality of not being around him struck her like lightning.

The second being in the closet as she tucked her blouse back into her skirt. In one of the deepest recesses of her mind, there was an inexorable, probing thought that only manifested due to their location: what would have happened had Danny never knocked on the closet door the first time? For every moment, there are hundreds of variables, hundreds of “what ifs” that are never realized. Lydia wondered what might have happened had they been given even two more minutes, if that would have affected Stiles’ decision to come up to her room, if they still would have started dating while their parents were in a relationship, if they would have started dating at all. A hundred variables and they still managed to find themselves in a closet, knowing there was more to what they had than what they could admit out loud. Except, in that moment as she prepared to leave the space that was just theirs, Lydia considered vocalizing how she felt and asking him to come with her. Then she hesitated and it was dark and it was safer to ask for something simple than for something that couldn’t be taken back.

But by the third time, Lydia was sure she knew what Stiles’ answer would be if she asked. Which was why she didn’t. They’ve spent a few weeks having sex and in the few preceding months, they’ve spent a substantial of time together in addition to the vast number of texts, calls, snapchats, and facetime calls when they weren’t with each other; there wasn’t a day when they didn’t at least send one text to each other. As much as she wants him, maybe it’s better if he’s not there next to her. Because eventually, he won’t be. Eventually, they’ll stop having sex and they’ll actually just be friends and he’ll start dating someone and Lydia needs to know that she can deal with Stiles being someone else’s constant. So, maybe eight weeks in Boston, where they don’t see each other outside of video calls and social media, is a good thing.

Or, at least, that was the justification she gave herself when she turned back to wave goodbye.

However, now that she’s actually in Boston, it’s entirely different.

(She misses him irrefutably. It’s ridiculous, and asinine, and she wants to pretend like it’s unexpected, but it’s not.)

The decision to call him is not one she gives too much thought to as she helps load her luggage into the trunk of the cab, it’s more because she knows if she doesn’t call him, she’ll call Stiles and there’s a high possibility she might ask him to join her if she does.

“Hey. So what do you think about salmon?” Isaac greets her with. “The color, not the fish.”

“I’ve been sleeping with Stiles,” Lydia curtly responds before she gets into the backseat.

“On Wednesday, I played ‘Truth or Dare’ with Kira, Malia, and a giant bottle of tequila. Malia dared me to buy whatever she chose online. There’s now a pair of non-refundable turquoise and tangerine hammer pants being shipped to our apartment, as well as a complimentary bear, whose size was suspiciously left off the description, that supposedly electronically sings and dances to my music when I plug my phone into it,” he says nonchalantly. Lydia’s eyebrows knit together, though she’s not sure if it’s more to do with his anecdote or his tone, but before she can reply, Isaac lets out a weighty sigh. “How am I the responsible one in our friendship?”

“You’re not the responsible one in our friendship.”

“You’re sleeping with Stiles.”

“We have an arrangement.”

“An ‘arrangement’? Is there paperwork involved?”

“Yes, Stiles wrote a ‘friends with benefits’ guideline that we had notarized.”

Isaac snorts into the phone. “You and Stiles are not ‘friends with benefits’.”

“We’re friends and there are benefits. What would you call it?”

“Delusional.”

 

 

* * *

 

Stiles felt personally offended when the IAU redefined the term “planet”. See, to him, Pluto is a planet, just like a tomato is a fruit and nobody actually likes coriander. So just because Pluto happens to be smaller than other planets, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t still orbit the sun or that its own gravity doesn’t still pull it into a shape of hydrostatic equilibrium.

And it’s weird that Pluto is what he’s thinking about as he throws his tennis ball against the wall but it’s all that’s been available in his head. The second he drove away from the airport, the second he parked the Jeep outside his apartment, the second he sat against his couch on the ground and started bouncing the ball against the wall, every second he’s been thinking about Lydia and distance and eventually Pluto.

Pluto: a planet with a chaotic orbit, that’s sensitive to immeasurably small details of the Solar System.

Pluto: the furthest planet from the Sun.

Pluto: the coldest planet.

He barely even registers Scott unlocking the front door until he drops his keys on the coffee table in front of Stiles, who waits until he catches his ball when it bounces back before he finally looks up at his best friend.

“What is this?” Scott asks, pointing his index finger up as he takes a seat against the wall opposite Stiles.

“The Cure. They really get me, Scott.”

“Like Foreigner got you in tenth grade?”

“I _am_ just a dirty white boy.”

Scott opens his hands and Stiles takes the hint, throwing the ball to his best friend. “So, Lydia’s gone.”

“Yeah, this morning. I’m guessing she’s there by now,” Stiles replies as Scott throws the ball back.

“You haven’t text her yet?”

“I’m not gonna annoy her with texts.”

“I was just thinking about a _single_ text, but okay.”

“If I text her once, it’s gonna open a floodgate. Sure, it starts innocently with a greeting, and then the next thing you know, I’m sending her a 4-part text message about agricultural subsidies.”

“Agricultural subsidies?”

“Exactly.”

“You can’t ask your _friend_ if she likes Boston without spiralling into a discussion about farming?”

Stiles catches the ball and rolls it between his hands as his brow furrows. “Why’d you say ‘friend’ like that, Scott?”

“Like what?” Scott asks with a false innocence Stiles knows too well.

“Like there’s more to it.”

Scott shrugs his shoulder. “Because there _is_ more to it.”

“That’s not true.”

“So, when I walked past Lydia’s room last night, I didn’t hear you two having sex?”

“Why were you walking past Lydia’s room last night?”

“I have bathroom needs, dude,” Scott says before shaking his head. “That’s not the point, my bowel movements aren’t important right now.”

“ _You_ brought them up.”

“ _You_ asked me what I was doing when I heard you and Lydia together.”

“Maybe you were half-asleep and thinking about Allison.”

“Or maybe you and Lydia have been having secret sex ever since you two had sex.”

Stiles stares at Scott, briefly contemplating whether or not to lie to him, then rolls his eyes. “Fine, we’ve been having sex. _But_ you can’t tell Lydia I told you. Or Allison. It’s secret sex for a reason.”

When he meets Scott’s eyes, there’s a mixture of joy and deliberation that doesn’t break even when Stiles throws the ball back to him. His lips purse briefly before he finally focuses on Stiles again. “What does this mean?”

“That Lydia and I are having sex but it’s secret so you can’t tell.”

“Are you dating again?”

And Stiles knows he shouldn’t have to pause to consider his response, because he knows they’re not, but he still does, because he knows what he wants his response to be. The problem is, he also knows that the response he wants to give can’t come into being without some serious, hard-core communicating that neither he nor Lydia are rushing to have. What they have now is friendship and sex and movie nights and family events and 11pm “can’t sleep” walks that turn into 3 am pancakes. It’s complicated and messy, and simple and easy simultaneously.

But they’re not dating.

So Stiles says; “No.”

“What are you then?”

“We’re...” Stiles begins while he’s still searching for the right term. Eventually, he gives up and gesticulates vaguely with his hands. “We’re something.”

“But you want to be dating again.”

Scott doesn’t inflect. They both know it’s not a question.

“Does Lydia know?” Scott asks.

“Nope.”

“Dude, you have to tell her.”

The corners of his mouth tug downwards as Stiles meets Scott’s gaze once again. It’s not like he hasn’t thought about it before; it was part of his hyperactive, ever-running internal monologue as he listened to Lydia fall asleep last night. But once it’s out there, once he brings the words to life and they hang between him and Lydia, that’s it. The words can live in the deepest recesses of his mind, rattle around in there for eternity, occasionally roll out into the spotlight so he can imagine all the consequences from verbalizing them. But actually verbalizing them is going to change things and he doesn’t know if he can cope with the consequences that his mind doesn’t fabricate.

“Do you know what the past twelve months has taught me, Scott?”

“I can think of about ten things that you probably aren’t going to say.”

“Ten?”

“Do you remember this time last year with the carnival ride, the teddy bear, and the cotton candy?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Allison that mad.”

“So, there’s _one_ lesson.”

Stiles mashes his lips together before he runs his hand over the back of his neck. “It taught me, or really it reiterated, how much I want everything with Lydia. Actually, she’s the only person that I want the whole goddamn thing with. But, the last time we did that, everything went to shit and there’s no guaranteeing that it won’t again, you know? My dad could get shot again... Lydia’s mom could get hit by a car... Something could happen to you, which would render me catatonic. I mean, it’s basic Murphy’s Law, Scott. And there’s nothing that shows me that we’re not gonna make the exact same mistakes again and wind up in the exact same place emotionally, minus the wedding reception physical location.”

“Isn’t you being aware of the problem a sign that it won’t happen again?” Scott asks after a brief pause.

“No,” Stiles replies bluntly. He shakes his head before he throws the ball back to Scott. “And right now, I can either have ‘something’ with Lydia or have ‘nothing’ with Lydia. And if those are my choices, I’m gonna choose to have ‘something’ with her. I’m gonna choose having a vague and indescribable ‘something’ with her every damn time.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Stiles eventually texts Lydia when Scott’s too preoccupied watching Friends to pay attention to him.

And honestly, Stiles has never been more grateful for those ellipses to pop up before because he was on the verge of texting her a list of pros for visiting Fenway Park, even though he knows it doesn’t even crack her ‘Top Twenty Places to Visit in Boston’ list.

(He probably will text her the pros eventually, because he doesn’t think she was actually paying attention when he first told her them. That might have had something to do with his rant beforehand about the team.)

 

**To: Lydia Martin                              Today 7:59 pm**

**You dump any tea in the harbor yet?**

 

**From: Lydia Martin                                     Today 8:01 pm**

**_I’m on my way to now._ **

 

**To: Lydia Martin                              Today 8:01 pm**

**Wicked.**

 

**From: Lydia Martin                                     Today 8:03 pm**

**_That doesn’t work over text._ **

 

**To: Lydia Martin                              Today 8:04 pm**

**Really? Or did you definitely read it in the accent?**

 

**From: Lydia Martin                                     Today 8:06 pm**

**_Tread lightly, Stilinski. I’m not opposed to adopting the accent and incorporating some Boston neologisms into my vocabulary solely for our phone conversations._ **

 

**To: Lydia Martin                              Today 8:08 pm**

**Can you? Cause I’ll do a Californian accent.**

 

**To: Lydia Martin                              Today 8:09 pm**

**I’m thinking an amalgamation of Penn in Fast Times, Cage in Valley Girls, and Scott that time at the beach senior year.**

 

**From: Lydia Martin                                    Today 8:11 pm**

**_You certainly know how to turn a girl on._ **

 

**To: Lydia Martin                              Today 8:12 pm**

**Not even gone 24 hours and you still remember, I’m touched.**

 

**From: Lydia Martin                                    Today 8:15 pm**

**_Do you know how distracting you are?_ **

 

**To: Lydia Martin                              Today 8:16 pm**

**I pride myself on it.**

 

**From: Lydia Martin                                    Today 8:20 pm**

**_I’ll call you later. If I spend any more time on my phone, the other people in the program are going to think I’m more interested in you than I am in them._ **

 

 

When Stiles locks his phone and finally glances away from it, his eyes meet Scott’s. Honestly, he has no idea how long his best friend has been watching him but Stiles doesn’t care, it doesn’t diminish the smile that’s settled on Stiles’ face. Though when Scott quirks an eyebrow and Stiles notices it out of the corner of his eye, he does end up rolling his eyes.

“Shut up, Scott.”

It’s only once Scott’s attention is back on the television screen that Stiles’ content smile returns and he settles back into the couch cushions feeling more relaxed than he has all day.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_You flicker. And you're beautiful. You glow inside my head. You hold me hypnotized. I'm mesmerized._

 

(“Dude, I never thought I’d miss three solid hours of Foreigner.”

“Don’t worry, Scotty, they’re on the playlist I’m making right now.”

“ _Awesome_.”)

 

 

* * *

 

 

 _Snoring_ : the vibration of respiratory structures and the resulting sound due to obstructed air movement during breathing while sleeping; the result of the relaxation of the uvula and soft palate.

Known to cause daytime drowsiness, irritability, a lack of focus, a decreased libido, and supposedly some significant psychological and social damage. However, most importantly, known to cause sleep deprivation to not only the snorers but the people around them.

Lydia happens to be one of those people.

It’s her fourth night in Boston and already she’s developing strong feelings of animosity towards her neighbors.

So now, at twelve past three in the morning, Lydia’s weighing the pros and cons of banging on the neighbors’ door in comparison with the pros and cons of sleeping on the couch. There are a number of hypothetical ramifications for each decision and Lydia needs to thoroughly examine each one before she makes her final decision.

Which she does, seven minutes later, as she tugs on a hoodie and leaves her room, sparing a moment to exclusively glare at the wall, before she does.

Her apartment and the building is quiet, which makes sense given everyone is enjoying the effects of sleep whereas Lydia has been kept awake by the two-person adenoidal jackhammer band that is her neighbors. Irritability is a common physiological effect of sleep deprivation, as are increased stress hormone levels and temper tantrums, though those are more common in children and should not be a possible course of action for an intelligent twenty-year-old who knows better.

Lydia fishes her phone out of the pocket of her hoodie, nimble fingers typing his name into the search bar like he isn’t easily accessible on her favorites list. Boston is three hours ahead of Stanford, meaning it’s only midnight, and Stiles is more than likely sitting on the couch, watching tv or playing a videogame, with or without Scott’s company.

He answers on the third ring as Lydia’s settling herself onto a couch. “You’ve reached Stiles Stilinski’s ass.”

“Finally cut out the middle man?” Lydia blithely asks.

It takes him a moment before he lets out a chortle. “‘Cause I talk out of my ass.”

Letting out an acquiescing hum, Lydia sets against the arm of the couch before she brings her knees to her chest. Periorbital puffiness and possible malaise aside, the one saving grace of sleep deprivation are the phone calls with Stiles that it inevitably leads to.

“So, you definitely have to put furniture against the wall to block out the sound,” Stiles says with a soft sigh. “I mean, I love spending the early mornings with you but I get to sleep in and you don’t. Which is not good considering you have a busy day of cross-breeding pinguicula and Venus flytraps ahead of you, Krelboyne.”

“Really, Stiles? _That_ made it into your Bill Murray filmography marathon? He’s a cameo.”

“Cameo or not, it’s a classic, Lydia.”

“Which movie are you on now?”

“ _Groundhog Day_. We decided to go chronologically instead of by genre.”

“Wow, so you’re already spending an inordinate amount of time doing nothing productive this summer.”

“Just like the God we don’t believe in intended.”

Lydia rolls her eyes while her amused nose exhale is trounced by a yawn. She curls further into the couch, covering her knees with the hoodie, as her eyes briefly flutter shut. “Even through the wall, their snoring sounds like there’s a fork stuck in the garbage disposal.”

“You know... I’ve got a heap of information in my arsenal that I know will make you fall asleep because it has before.”

“Like what?”

“The history of ‘violent’ video games and why they still continue to be popular. I can even talk monotonously if you want. Like, five minutes of this will make you forget all about the snoring.”

With a small shrug that he can’t see, Lydia stands up and begins to walk back to her room. “What have I got to lose?”

“ _Aww, babe_ ,” Stiles says in a syrupy voice. “That’s what you said when we started dating.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Lydia would never admit that she’s lonely, but she does spend a disproportionate amount of time on her phone in her spare time.

She’s established friendships in the program, enough that she has people to talk to and who she can go out with on the weekend; they just usually leave her feeling like she’s alone in a crowded room.

It becomes increasingly obvious to her that Stiles is aware of this, even though he never says it aloud.

He’ll send her random texts, things like his thoughts of the day and useless facts that might only help for trivia nights.

Or he’ll send her photos that he takes, sometimes he tries to make them pretentious and artsy but sometimes they’re just ordinary “I saw this and thought of you” photos.

Or he’ll call her to let her rant or so they can sit in silence together.

Lydia knows it’s increasingly obvious to Stiles that she’s grateful for him, even though she never says it aloud.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Stiles is just so grateful that he no longer has to write those annoying essays about how he spent his summer. At least when he was younger he occasionally had something interesting to write about, like that weekend he, his dad, and Scott were camping for the weekend and tried to go fishing but ended up relying on burgers and fries for sustenance because they couldn’t actually catch any fish.

Now, his essay would most likely resemble a recipe for how to be a semi-productive, semi-social, semi-functioning member of society.

 

Wake up way too early.

Go to work tired and/or hungover.

Spend work break scrolling through newsfeed and messaging your two best friends, the first being your brother and the second being the girl you’re pretending you don’t have solar-eclipsing feelings for.

Try to be social and go out for longer than a few hours, then choose to hang out with the aforementioned best friend/brother.

Devote multiple hours into a single video game that you’ve played countless times before.

Message the aforementioned best friend you have feelings for.

Drink or get high, it’s a judgement call.

Get invested in infomercials and try _not_ to buy anything.

Fall asleep on the couch probably.

Rinse.

Repeat.

 

And when it comes to his days off, the time he would usually spend at work is dedicated to either playing the same video game he’s been playing all week, or binge-watching cooking shows, or with Scott, or occasionally shopping. He’s also somehow managed to become friends with the elderly in his building and in the general neighborhood. He plays backgammon or chess with the elderly guys in the park, or he joins the group of elderly people for their daily walk, or he sits with the elderly women at the rec center and plays mahjong; Stiles sometimes legitimately complains that his sciatica is acting up, which alarms yet doesn’t surprise him.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The problem with being in a skype call with Stiles is that sometimes he forgets that she can see him. It doesn’t happen all the time but there have been a few notable occasions that made him subsequently squawk in surprise when he realized that she saw everything. Watching him sing and dance to Hollaback Girl is a memory she will treasure for the rest of her life.

Today is no different. Lydia’s supposed to be transferring her written notes onto her computer but instead, she finds herself transfixed by Stiles reprimanding his new vacuum.

(“You spent money you don’t have to buy a vacuum you don’t need?”

“ _No_ , I went to a yard sale and found this robot vacuum that I _definitely_ need and bought it for $20. Lydia, meet R2-D2.”)

It’s fascinating for a number of reasons, but mostly because the real appeal of the vacuum is the fact that it doesn’t need human help to do its job and yet, Stiles is berating it because it keeps spinning counter-clockwise. There’s now one exceptionally clean part of his floor.

But quickly, her attention is drawn to the space in front of the coffee table or, more accurately, to the upside down bowl placed in front of it.

A frown quickly settles on her face as the realization kicks in. “Seriously, Stiles?”

And, just like she expected, Stiles lets out a squawk of surprise and earnestly clutches a hand to his chest. “Fuck me, Lydia. Warn a guy next time.”

“You slide the paper under the bowl,” Lydia explains, pointedly ignoring his comments. “You lift the corners of the paper around the bowl then carefully lift the bowl off the ground. You carry the bowl outside, place it on the ground, and then lift it up enough so that the spider can escape. You take the bowl back into the apartment and fill it with scalding hot water.”

Stiles’ brow furrows as he contemplates it. His eyes dart from his camera to the bowl before he finally shakes his head. “Yeah, I’m not doing that.”

“Leaving the spider trapped in a bowl on your floor is cruel.”

“It has eight legs, okay? That’s not natural. Any more than six legs is just creepy and excessive.”

“Then you live in the wrong state. The millipede species with the most legs can be found in California.”

“Oh god, do I even want to know?”

“On average, they have over 600.”

Stiles pokes out his tongue in disgust, the corners of his mouth tugging downwards, as he pretends to dry heave. Or actually dry heaves. It’s hard to distinguish after he bends over, his hands pressed against his knees. Her eyes follow the movement of his abdomen and realizes that it’s probably wrong to be turned on by that.

When Stiles’ head pops up, disgust replaced by elation, Lydia momentarily questions if she spoke aloud. Then she notices his smile is directed to the vacuum and not her.

“R2, you’re alive!”

For some reason, as Lydia watches Stiles applaud an appliance, she finds herself contemplating phone sex. And not for the first time since she's been in Boston.

 

 

* * *

 

 

This summer, Stiles’ best friend (besides Scott and Lydia) is this old guy, Morty, who Stiles plays chess with in the park. Their friendship started because Stiles decided to accompany Mrs Davis on her afternoon walk one day and she chose to have a break in park, though Stiles still maintains that she chose that spot in particular to flirt with one of Morty’s friends and Mrs Davis still maintains that Stiles needs to get his mind of the gutter. Still, during the time when Mrs Davis was _not_ flirting with the friend, Stiles was introducing himself to Morty and telling him how he could win the chess match in three moves; after that worked, Morty told him to come back for a game the next day and Stiles did.

When Stiles’ shifts finish at noon, he brings the coffee (black with three sugars for Morty, decaf for him) and pieces of apple pie. They talk about old movies and books, Morty tells him and Scott stories from when his twenties, occasionally he lets Stiles win a game of chess. One afternoon, Morty let Stiles try on his Porkpie just so Stiles could send a selfie to Lydia and Scott. In hindsight, Stiles should have known that Morty would have picked up on the fact that he also sent the selfie to Lydia.

“Miss Martin, huh?” Morty says, glancing from his side of the board to Stiles’ face.

And Stiles never thought he’d call an octogenarian a ‘little shit’, but there’s a first time for everything.

Stiles runs his hand along the back of his neck like the action will soothe the marimba that is his heart beat now. “Yeah, I like sending her photos that make her question why she’s friends with me. I mean, it was either that or stamp collecting.”

“And how is she?”

“Uh...”

Because is he supposed to give her stock answer? Or the truth?

The stock answer is the usual “ _I’m great, the program is enriching, Boston is incredible”_ and follows the ‘two truths and a lie’ route.

Whereas the truth is... more truthful. And exclusive. And not actually his to share.

“Lydia’s awesome, which isn’t surprising because she was pretty much made for Boston.”

Morty’s brow furrows as he looks over his glasses at Stiles. “And what about you?”

“Well, I’m four moves away from beating a senior citizen in a game of chess, so I’m living the dream.”

Stiles is also only three moves away from having his ass handed to him by said senior citizen, but he chooses to ignore that and take one of Morty’s pawns instead.

“How long until she’s back?”

“Five weeks, 6 days,” Stiles answers immediately before slowing blinking and waving a hand dismissively in the space in front of him. “Or something like that.”

Apparently there’s a second time for calling an octogenarian a ‘little shit’, which Stiles finds out when his eyes land on Morty’s knowing expression.

 _Little shit_.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Are there any nice guys in Boston?”

Lydia’s not taken aback by the question, but she is a little surprised that it took her mother this long to ask. The question of ‘when will Lydia start dating again?’ has no doubt had a presence in Natalie’s mind for a while. It’s been an underlying thought in every one of their conversations since Lydia’s birthday, one that had yet to be verbalized despite numerous insinuations toward it.

And there’s a small, and possibly gauche, part of Lydia that wants to tell her mother that Stiles is still fulfilling every one of her needs so there’s no need to bring a third party into it.

Obviously she doesn’t, but she does roll her eyes in an exaggerated manner that her mother can’t miss.

“Because Owen has a nephew studying at Brown and we think that--”

“Mom, don’t finish that sentence.”

“Lydia, it’s been four months.”

“I’m aware, thank you,” Lydia bites back. After meeting Natalie’s gaze, Lydia inhales deeply before plastering a smile on her lips. “But I think that it would be best if the next person I dated wasn’t quasi-related to me.”

Her response seems to be enough to quell her mother’s interest in Lydia’s single status for the moment, which is why Natalie begins to tell her about the latest debacle Lydia’s younger cousins got themselves into. Not that Lydia is actually paying attention, she just nods her head when it seems appropriate and uses the stock reactions she’s perfected over the past few years. Instead, her primary focus is directed on Stiles and the decimated remains of their romantic relationship and the burgeoning potential of their new relationship.

The latter is a problem.

And she’s trying to find an answer but all she can see are the scrawls of past gaffes from the last time she tried to figure it out. Only Isaac isn’t here to offer his annoyingly sage advice this time.

When you call someone ‘salt of the earth’, you’re saying there’s a simple, fundamental goodness to them.

When you say someone is ‘salting the earth’, you’re saying that they’re desecrating a location and ensuring that nothing fruitful will ever grow there again; it’s a pre-emptive curse for anyone who dares rebuild on that location.

Neither she nor Stiles can be referred to as ‘salt of the earth’, but they both salted the earth that was their romantic relationship.

Yet somehow, through some miracle that she doubts even Cybele could conceive, they were able to create something new on the remnant of what they had. Something beautiful and chaotic and fulfilling and borderline detrimental that’s going to inevitably crumble and become the calamity Allison was worried about. Lydia chose pyroclastic surges and ashfall, she chose Pompeii over Misenum, but that doesn’t mean Vesuvius’ eruption isn’t going to wreck her.

The thought is still the focal point in her mind when Stiles calls her later that night.

“So, I think you might be my impulse control,” Stiles begins, not even bothering with a greeting before launching into his spiel. Honestly, Lydia’s appreciative because the moment she hears his voice, it feels like her heart’s leapt up into her throat. “You fell asleep last night and I kept watching Guy until the marathon of episodes ended – by the way, I discovered, like, six new restaurants I wanna try and you’ll like at least two of them, I promise –  but then I switched channels and there were these infomercials that I hadn’t seen before. Basically, they were selling this knife that can cut through a penny and obviously I called bullshit because half the knives in my kitchen can’t even cut through bread and I only keep them there to scare off potential intruders. But then they showed the knife actually cutting through pennies and I bought one; I don’t have an overwhelming desire to cut coinage but I like having the ability to physically cut a penny if I want, it makes me feel powerful.”

Lydia sits there on her bed, legs tucked underneath her, as she tries to ignore her own thoughts and focus solely on the conversation she’s currently supposed to be a part of. The only problem is that, even if she does try to ignore it, there’s still a faint buzzing in her ears to remind her that she’s pointedly ignoring a problem and that’s one contributing factor that led to her leaving Stiles alone at his father’s wedding reception.

“Wow, I know that wasn’t my _best_ anecdote, but your silence is kind of deafening,” Stiles says, sounding a little deflated.

“Do you realize,” Lydia begins softly, cautiously structuring her wording like there’s a string of sentences that _won’t_ make this hurt, like her walls can still protect her from a Stilinski-related calamity. “That if we only take into consideration the past two weeks I’ve been in Boston, you and I have spoken more than we did during the final weeks of our relationship? That you can call to tell me that you bought a piece of kitchenware that will so obviously result in an injury of some kind and it’s normal, but six months ago, you froze if our conversations deviated from small talk? There are currently 3000 miles between us and we communicate more than when we slept in the same bed, isn’t that weird to you, Stiles?”

There’s silence on his end, she can’t even hear him breathing though that may be due to the heavy thumping of her heart that’s echoing in her ears. They spent weeks avoiding the conversation that Lydia’s just started.

Lydia steels herself, tries to prepare for whatever is going to inevitably fall from Stiles’ lips, but she knows when it comes to this, she’ll never be fortified enough to walk away without repercussions etched in her memory.

The idea that time heals all wounds is ridiculous. Time just allows opportunity for a bandage to be placed over the wound, for a thin layer of scar tissue to grow over it, but it’ll never be healed the way a scraped knee or a paper cut will. The wound is always there, always a presence, and eventually, it’ll be perforated, either by you or by someone else, and you’ll know that all time did was provide you with a superficial feeling of recovery.

Four months ago, she likened calling Stiles, while she was also wearing his hoodie, with carving at an infected open wound using a blunt, oxidized spoon. And right now bears a striking resemblance to then.

“I don’t want to have this conversation over the phone,” Stiles finally answers, his voice barely above a whisper.

“I don’t want to wait until you to discover how humans can successfully teleport to have this conversation,” Lydia snaps, her voice no louder than his but patently more acidic.

“You’ll be back in a few weeks.”

Lydia purses her lip as an indignant exhale leaves her nose. She knows exactly what she _wants_ to say and exactly why she can’t say it. An alternative she contemplates is ending the call in anger and throwing her phone down on the bed then ignoring Stiles when he calls her back, but when trying to discuss a communication breakdown, the best course of action is to continue communicating and not backslide. So instead, Lydia considers how she can structure what she wants to say, keeping the tone and underlying idea intact, while ensuring that it doesn’t come across as manipulative.

“We’ve already spent weeks of our lives avoiding this conversation.”

“Which gave us time to hone our evasion skills.”

“Sublimation, Stiles? Seriously?”

“Says the queen of intellectualization. At least my defence mechanism isn’t neurotic.”

“You’re right. Between the two of us, you’re clearly the more rational.”

“Thank you for conceding.”

The muted groan she releases seems to reverberate through her room, her fingers coming up to pinch the bridge of her nose as she does. “I can’t do this.”

“Do what?” Stiles asks, though she doubts he’s legitimately feigning obliviousness.

“ _This_ ,” she replies brusquely. “Isaac was right.”

“Lydia, I honestly don’t know if I can get behind a conjecture from Isaac.”

“The Invariant Subspace Problem is a conjecture,” Lydia counters. “There’s definitive proof behind what Isaac said. We’re not ‘ _friends with benefits_ ’. There are strings attached to this. To _us_. We’re exclusively entwined with each other and pretending like we’re not.”

Stiles hesitates, blowing out a shaky breath before he finally clears his throat. “Okay, so we’re... we’re something.”

“Which is what, Stiles?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not a good enough answer.”

“Then you tell me, okay? What the hell are we, Lydia?”

And now Lydia grasps why Isaac chose that word in particular. Out of all the adjectives at his disposal, he chose that one because it encapsulated their relationship perfectly.

The sigh that falls from her lips is heavy, mirroring the weight she feels on her chest. “Delusional, Stiles. We’re delusional.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Delusional?”

“Yeah, that’s what Lydia said, Scott.”

“And what did you say?”

“My mind went blank.”

“ _Your_ mind went blank?”

“It was a shock to me too. I couldn’t even think of a sarcastic remark.”

“Wow, Lydia really threw you.”

“Not that that’s surprising.”

“No, not at all.”

“And now I have to form a response because if I wait too long, it’s gonna piss her off.”

“I think the fact that you faked a phone call from our parents to get out of the conversation already pissed her off.”

“Yeah, but percentage-wise, I’d say she’s only like 20% pissed at that. _But_ the longer I take, the higher that percentage rises.”

“How long until it reaches 100%?”

“Taking into account the distance between us and the topic of conversation, I’d say two days.”

“Okay, well, what do you have so far?”

“Nada.”

“Seriously?”

“Hey, I’ve done more with less time.”

“I’m starting to see why Lydia called you ‘delusional’, Stiles.”

“ _Yeah_... So am I.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

There have been very few times in her life when Lydia has actually, genuinely contemplated the psychological, legal, and social ramifications of dispatching someone. Obviously, the majority of these instances are the result of watching either too many or a single particularly heinous episode of any of the Law and Orders and they are almost always part of a discussion with Stiles.

But occasionally there are moments that don’t come with background music in the form of a catchy theme song.

This happens to be one of those moments, because it’s thirteen past four and Lydia’s been jolted awake by the insistent ringing of her phone. Her hand swats against the bedside table until she finally reaches it.

“Do you have _any_ idea what time it is?” Lydia asks, not even bothering to check the caller ID first.

“Oh fuck,” Stiles says, a little too loudly for her likely, as the realization hits him. “I totally forgot about the time difference. I’m sorry.”

And Lydia doesn’t know whether she’s angrier about the fact that he chose to end the silence between them at a remarkably inappropriate time of the day or that he woke her up or that he sounds so unaffected, like the past few days haven’t concerned him.

She knows what she’s angrier about as she runs her fingers through her hair and sits up against her bedframe. Maybe she should just hang up and make him call her back at a reasonable hour, but it’s not like she’s going to be able to fall back into a peaceful slumber now.

“What do you want, Stiles?”

“Obviously, I had a vindictive plan to wake you up and subsequently ruin your day.”

“I wouldn’t put it past you. You did put a Bluetooth speaker in my air vent so you could play ‘Let’s Get It On’ when I was with Jackson.”

Stiles quietly chuckles, clearly still proud of himself. “Yeah, that was a fun afternoon.”

“Very productive,” Lydia adds with a roll of her eyes as she sits down on a couch, back resting against the armrest.

“I’m glad you can finally admit it.”

“Well, a lack of sleep can affect decision making.”

“Do you want me to call you later?” Stiles asks, levity gone from his tone and replaced by concern.

“Don’t even think about it.”

“Okay.”

Lydia stretches her back, her legs straightening across the mattress when she does. “You never answered my question by the way. What do you want?”

“To talk.”

“That’s new.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry that I haven’t--”

“Stiles, I don’t want an apology.”

“You don’t?”

“What I want is for you to tell me whatever you thought was important enough to unceremoniously wake me up at four am.”

He tries to clear his throat quietly, tries to hide whatever apprehension he’s feeling despite the fact that he’s the one who chose to start this conversation in the first place. “So, I’ve been watching The West Wing again, which I know we said would be the next tv show we’d marathon but it was calling to me. And I got to the shutdown episode and Bartlet’s walking to the Hill and all I could think about was that afternoon during winter break when you were pissed at me for I still don’t know what and decided the best way to exact revenge was to plant yourself on the couch next to me and watch season five with me. Not that you actually let me watch it. You started talking about the BBEDCA and we got into that heated discussion about budget sequestration and Keynes that only ended because my dad asked us what we wanted for dinner.”

When Stiles pauses, irrespective of how brief that silence is, a lump begins to form in her throat. Lydia wonders whether her breathing reveals the tension coursing underneath her skin, even though she knows that Stiles wouldn’t mention it if it did. Still, Lydia finds herself deliberating whether or not she should mute herself, whether or not she should leave her side of the phone call disconcertingly silent so that only she can hear the wavering of her exhales.

Stiles releases a feeble laugh and the sound settles itself in her heart. “Lydia, I don’t actively try to think about you. It’s not like I set aside time in my day to think about you. It’s not like ‘oh hey, it’s 1 o’clock, time to wonder what Lydia’s up to and whether I should call her or is calling too much, maybe a text is--”

“Stiles, tangent,” Lydia interrupts, her voice more quivering than exasperated despite her attempts for it to sound like the latter.

“Right, sorry,” Stiles replies in a tone louder than the one he had allotted for the night. “The point is, thinking about you isn’t an active process for me. You’re just here, Lydia. In my head. _Constantly_. It’s like you own property up there. And, no matter what happens to us, whatever our relationship is, that’s not gonna change, you’re never gonna _not_ have a home in my head.”

And that’s the moment when Lydia’s relieved that she chose to mute herself, because the exhale that falls from her lips is too heavy for either of them to ignore. Instead, what Stiles hears is a resounding nothingness and that’s not fair to him, but she can’t bring herself to click the mute button off.

Stiles clears his throat, almost as if he’s trying to get rid of a lump in his throat similar to the one in hers. “Do you know how many times I tried to blame my dad getting shot and that jackass Donovan for what happened to us? Sure, my dad’s mortality is one of the reasons why I proposed, but we’re why we broke up. Because we were so determined to pretend that we were okay that it was easier sometimes to not talk because talking might ruin the shroud of artificial okay we created. Which is why we can talk now. Because we’re not trying to maintain a lie, we’re just being together as whatever the fuck we are. And honestly, Lydia, I don’t need to define us. Giving _this_ a title isn’t gonna change its importance because it’s already one of the most important things in my life. _You’re_ already one of the most important parts of my life.”

Actually, _this_ is the moment when Lydia’s grateful that the mute button exists. It gives her a brief instant to compose her thoughts and herself before she replies to Stiles. Those few seconds it allows her – where her emotions aren’t present, where there isn’t the chance that Stiles will hear anything that could leave her mouth, where she appears steadier than she actually is – gives her a chance to consider what her verbal response is.

_This, what we are, and you are important to me too._

_Do you realize that eventually we’re going to have to define us anyway? That there will be a day when ambiguity isn’t enough and we’ll have to decide what we are?_

_Do you think we could ever be something similar to what we were before?_

_Are we in love with each other?_

Lydia turns off the mute button, ignoring her heartbeat thumping in her ear, and smiles tenderly, even though she knows he can’t see her. “You’re a persistent presence in my head too, Stiles.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“That was romantic,” Morty finally says after Stiles finishes relaying what happened between himself and Lydia.

It’s great, Morty’s like the free therapist Stiles never knew he needed. And Stiles gets to play chess and eat food during the (usually) unlimited session; some days Morty has to meet up with his grandkids so their conversations get cut short but Stiles doesn’t mind. Honestly, if all therapy was like this, it’d be way more fun in addition to being cathartic.

“I don’t know if I’d call it ‘romantic’, I’d say ‘necessary’.”

“Well, either way, you’ve certainly pulled your head out of your ass so that’s something.”

“Thank you.”

“So, now what?” Morty asks as he takes one of Stiles’ rooks, ignoring the sound of indignation Stiles lets out.

“I figured we’d finish this game then go get lunch at that shop you won’t stop talking about.”

“I meant with you and Miss Martin.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Stiles replies, feigning obliviousness, his fingers stilling on his knight. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t?”

“You know, with that tone of voice, it seems like you know more about my relationship with Lydia than I do.”

Morty smirks as he moves a pawn. “I don’t _know_ anything more than what you’ve told me, but I _assume_ that you have feelings for her that run deeper than friendship.”

There are certain things that Stiles willingly divulges to Morty: his friendship with Scott, his work, his education, how his dad and Melissa are. He does so not only because Morty shares with him, but because it’s nice to have someone who’s more of an observer of Stiles’ life to talk to about these things. But one part of his life that Stiles has never be entirely truthful about is where his relationship with Lydia currently is, i.e. the fact that they habitually had sex before she left for Boston. All Morty knows is that Lydia is Stiles’ ex-girlfriend and one of his best friends, or so Stiles assumed.

“You know what they say about assuming, Morty.”

“That it makes an ass out of _you_ , Stiles.”

“And _me_ ,” Stiles immaturely retorts before he rolls his eyes. “Good one.”

When they get down to their final few pieces, Stiles feels Morty’s gaze linger on him longer than he normally does at this stage of a game. But it’s only when Morty hesitates in taking Stiles’ last pawn that Stiles finally says something, because there are very few times when Morty doesn’t relish getting closer to winning.

“Wanna share with the class?”

“Do you know what you have when you’re eighty?” Morty asks.

“Incontinence?”

“Regret.”

“Pretty sure every age has that, but continue.”

“I will never regret my wife or my kids, but I do regret some of the choices I’ve made and some of the opportunities I didn’t take. It took me two years to work up the courage to ask my wife on a date, and I’ve regretted that cowardice every day since she passed because it cost me two more years with the love of my life. Trust me, kid, that’s no way to live.”

Stiles deliberates before finally sighing, ignoring his desire to roll his eyes. “You know, people always say not to live with regrets, but that’s bullshit because you’re always going to. There’s always going to be at least one thing in your life that you regret. Literally, if you ask anyone on the street if they have any regrets and they say no, then they’re an outright liar because regret’s an intrinsic part of being human. And sure, maybe you would’ve had two more years with Dorothy, but your lives would’ve been different, your kids, where and who you are now.”

“Maybe so,” Morty replies with an almost sage nod. “But if it meant two more years, I’d take that risk. Because when you love somebody and they’re the only person you _know_ you could ever wholeheartedly love, the risk is worth the reward.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

As it turns out, in the end what motivates him to get off his ass and do something more than what he’s been doing for the past four weeks is the tone of Lydia’s voice one night.

Not Scott.

Or Morty.

Or himself.

What gets him to actually do something is listening to Lydia actively try to not talk and instead get Stiles to talk instead, which he does because it feels like she needs it. He tells her about the video game he’s playing, goes into way more depth than he needs to, and Lydia just breathes into the phone, the soft sound reverberating in his ears.

Stiles never asks her if she’s okay; he already knows the answer.

She has friends, but not the kind you can go out to breakfast and dinner with, or go to Zumba with, or not feel embarrassed doing karaoke with. They are friendships acquired due to location and circumstance, ones that she could become closer with but inevitably won’t.

So, sometimes, she feels lonely. And as much as she loves being in Boston and at MIT, her love for that doesn’t kerb the loneliness that she sometimes feels. And Stiles tries to do what he can to help that, they all do, but that doesn’t always work. And he hates that, because he knows that Lydia relies more heavily on them for love and support than she does on her family.

Which is why Stiles talks about a video game Lydia doesn’t like for three hours on a Friday night until she says goodnight.

It’s _that_ tone that really solidifies his decision.

 

 

* * *

 

 

When Lydia wakes up late on Sunday morning, she lays there for twenty minutes, staring at the ceiling and contemplating whether to follow her usual Sunday routine. There’s a comfort and catharsis that can be achieved through following familiar patterns where the outcomes are well known and unlikely to lead to further frustration and/or aggravation. Yet still, there’s a comfort and catharsis that can be achieved through simply lying in bed until Lydia actually has to move; her bed is comfortable, and her laptop and the wifi connection means she can watch any tv show, movie, or documentary she wants.

Eventually, Lydia chooses to follow her normal routine, even though she does let out a small groan when she finally puts her foot on the floor.

But it’s only once she’s at what’s become her usual yoga studio that Lydia begins to see the benefits of boxing that Allison’s always mentioning. Though Lydia’s seldom taken Allison’s offer, choosing Zumba and yoga with Allison instead, Lydia is sure she’s going to join her best friend when they’re both back in Berkeley. Lydia thinks her catharsis would be easily achieved through hitting a punching bag as opposed to through Extended Puppy pose.

After yoga, when she walks away still feeling tense, Lydia reconsiders her theory from early in the morning and suddenly wishes she had chosen to stay in bed. Her usual Sunday routine typically continues with sitting in the coffee shop down the road with her laptop for one or two hours (the duration of time is dependent on how her week has been), and then spending a few hours walking around Boston, but Lydia chooses to forgo the rest of her routine; she does still visit the coffee shop, but that’s to buy an iced latte in the largest cup size they have.

Despite forgoing her usual routine, Lydia finds herself wandering into the Common instead of going back to find solace on her bed. She gets lost in the sounds around her, in all the faces that pass her by, all of the hypothetical lives she creates for them because she knows she’ll never be able to know about their real ones.

In the end, Lydia sits there for longer than she expects. But it ends up calming her more than anything else does. So when she finally finds her way back home, she feels looser than she has all week, and as her fingers type out a response to Allison’s worried text, it doesn’t feel like a lie to tell her that she’s okay.

Lydia’s focus shifts from Allison’s reply when she notices someone sitting on the stairs outside the front door. Her eyes roll of their own volition because this is the third time someone from her apartment building has locked themselves out and honestly, she might leave the next person outside.

There’s a snarky comment on the tip of her tongue as she begins fishing for her keys that instantly fades away when her eyes finally land on the person.

Because they’re not from her apartment building.

And they’re currently hunched over their phone, too heavily invested in Bejeweled to notice her presence.

Which is good, because Lydia’s having a hard time wrapping her mind around the fact that Stiles Stilinski is in Boston, and that he took a six-hour flight so he could be in Boston, and that he sat on her stoop and waited for god knows how long just so he could surprise her.

Lydia blinks once. Then again. Then inhales a small, soft breath in an attempt to calm the jackhammering of her heart, which doesn’t work because Lydia’s sure this is the part in the cartoon where her heart breaks through her mediastinum and her thorax for all the world to see. That’s not what she wants. Not right now. What she wants is rational, clearheaded thinking because Stiles flew across the country and there’s no doubt in her mind that she was the overwhelming factor in that decision, which means a myriad of things that Lydia doesn’t know if she can dissect as she stands opposite him.

So, she exhales slowly, considers what her first words to him should be, and eventually settles on: “Someone told me that the device in your hands has the ability to convert sound into electronic signals that can be transmitted over long distances while also remitting similar signals from the other end that _you_ can hear.”

The corners of Stiles’ mouth quirk upwards as he lifts his head to look at her. “Would that be the same person who told you that the Lumières’ train _wasn’t_ coming directly at the audience? ‘Cause I don’t know how trustworthy that someone is.”

Lydia smiles, folding her arms across her chest. “What are you doing here?”

“Well, I took your advice: put bowl over spider, slide paper underneath, carry spider outside, success. Which totally bit me in the ass because the spiders were cocky and revolted, and now my apartment is theirs until further notice.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. And I thought you could be my safe haven,” he says as he pushes himself onto his feet and slides his phone into his back pocket.

This is the shortest distance there’s been between them for a month yet somehow, Stiles’ minute steps towards her make it feel like a ravine. But it’s only when he’s right in front of her that Lydia’s struck by how desperately she wants her hands on him; Lydia refrains, in no small part due to the look in Stiles’ eyes. There’s a blatant apprehension scantily hidden by his light-heartedness, almost like there’s a small part of him that thinks she’ll actually reject him, which is so ridiculous that Lydia actually bites her bottom lip to stop herself from laughing. But her expression must give her disbelief away because almost immediately Stiles’ body relaxes and he pats his hands against his jeans.

“So, what do you say?” Stiles asks.

And Lydia can think of at least ten response she could give him that range from sarcastic to heartfelt, and yet none feel right for this moment. So, she chooses to cup his cheeks and bring his lips down to meets hers instead. An absolutely wrong decision, Lydia realizes, because what was conceived to be a soft, answering kiss becomes heavy and ardent when one of Stiles’ hands moves to the back of her head and the other to the small of her back. His mouth quickly opens up to hers, their tongues moving together in an organized chaos that lights a fire underneath her skin and makes her lean further into him as her hands slide from his cheeks to the back of his neck. But, conclusively, it’s once his hand slides down to her ass that Lydia realizes what a mistake it was to do this on the street.

Lydia reaches around her to tug his hand off her before she pulls away. An unsteady breath leaves her as her tongue runs along her bottom lip, tracing the tingling sensation that Stiles left. Her eyes open to see Stiles staring at her, eyes half-lidded and lips smudged with her lipstick, looking as wrecked as Lydia feels and, more than likely, looks like too.

“You should... come inside,” Lydia says shakily, intertwining her fingers with the hand he’d had on her ass.

With only a nod, Stiles follows her into the apartment building, pausing only to pick up his luggage with his free hand. No free hands turns out to be a good thing, because Stiles can’t touch her as they walk and tease her and make her contemplate whether they could get away with getting off in a supply closet or the staircase alcove; they could, they have before, and they’re remarkably good in confined spaces. But he still manages to stoke the fire building inside of her with each movement of his thumb against her hand.

As soon as her front door is shut, Stiles unceremoniously throws his bag to her couch, following Lydia’s lead, before his body crashes into hers. Their mouths meet again, all heavy and transfixing, something that Lydia feels igniting her once again. She brings a hand up to the back of his neck, twirling strands of his hair between her fingers, while she tries to lock the door with the other, a task that proves easier said than done. Especially when Stiles’ lips leave hers to travel along the expanse of her neck and she finds herself backed against the very door she’s trying to lock.

First failure to lock, Stiles’ lips press against her pulse.

Second failure to lock, Stiles’ hand is sliding from her hip to her breast.

Third failure to lock, Lydia’s considering just fucking against the door.

Fourth time, it locks and Lydia brings Stiles’ mouth back to hers with a smile as her other hand pushes him to start walking back to her bedroom, kicking their shoes off as they go. When Stiles’ back hits the wall, he laughs against her mouth before turning them so she can lead them instead.

Lydia pulls away from the kiss, partly to catch her breath and partly to push him onto her bed. And there’s something striking about seeing Stiles on her sheets, staring up at her with wonder and want and lips tinted by her, that leaves her feeling breathless. There have been instances where she’s imagined him here in this room – underneath her, on top of her, in front of her, behind her – but they pale in comparison to him actually being here with that lopsided smile on his face that reverberates through her body.

When she straddles him, her hands rest on his chest over his heart, like she needs further confirmation that he’s actually here, before trailing up to his cheeks, her thumbs tracing over his cheekbones. And it’s in this moment that she realizes irrefutably that she both needs and wants Stiles.

She needs him because he’s managed to become like an appendage to her. There’s an overwhelming need for him to have a presence in her life that isn’t at all motivated by romance or sex; it’s platonic and fundamental and Lydia couldn’t get rid of it even if she tried. But her world will continue to spin and her life will continue to be extraordinary if all they have is friendship. Lydia doesn’t need to be with Stiles in order to breathe.

But she _wants_ to be with him. She wants to accidentally stay up all night because they’re so engrossed in their conversation to notice the time, and she wants to wake up next to him and find his arm strewn across her body, and she wants him to be beside her when she achieves greatness just like she wants to be next to him when he does. There are hundreds of situations that she can think of as her eyes meet Stiles’ that she wants to have with him, but the overwhelming similarity between them all is the simple truth: Lydia wants to be with Stiles.

And Stiles flew from Stanford to Boston. He _grand-gestured_. Lydia’s not exactly uncertain of his feelings for her. And she certainly doesn’t have to question whether he wants her or not.

Lydia’s only been staring for a few seconds, but it’s enough for a questioning expression to etch itself across Stiles’ features as his hands drift down her body. “What is it?”

Obviously, there is a small part of her that considers the possibility of sharing her thoughts with him, but that part quickly realizes that she can do that later when Stiles’ hands aren’t on her ass. Lydia gives him a tender smile she her thumbs run over his cheekbones once again. “I’m just admiring your face.”

His inquisitive frown shifts into a lopsided smile that’s accompanied by an almost disbelieving laugh. There’s a brief pause where Stiles seems to contemplate his response then lets out another laugh. “Would it ruin the mood if I asked you if you wanted to sit on it?”

A loud, unreserved laugh escapes her as she leans down to kiss him, more sweet and open than their others had been. It’s easy to just melt into the kiss, into the feel of Stiles’ hands on her body as they trail up and under her dress, to forget what she was thinking about and focus solely on this and them. She sighs against his mouth as his thumbs begin to rub slow circles into her hipbones. Lydia pulls away from the kiss so she can pull her dress over her head and Stiles can pull his t-shirt off.

When their mouths meet again, Stiles rolls them over and his hips surge forward, drawing a groan from both of them. He does it again and again then draws it out when she tugs his bottom lip between her teeth only to grind himself against her again. Her hands leave his back to duck between them, fingers managing to open the button of his jeans, before his mouth leaves hers to slowly trail kisses down the length of her body. Lydia’s head falls back against the pillow, her hips twitching, when Stiles reaches her panties.

He slides them off her legs so slowly that Lydia honestly feels like she could whine. She refrains.

But then he’s between her legs and she can feel the warmth of his breath against her wet center and Lydia can’t refrain herself from whining. Though, it comes out more like a whimper as she bucks her hips up to him. Stiles gets the message, and she ignores the smirk she sees briefly stretch across his lips because then his mouth is on her clit and, _god_ , has she missed him.

One finger slides into her, then a second after her hands finds purchase in his hair and she tugs the strands between her fingers. He fucks into her slow and deep, every movement of his fingers and tongue leaving her a little more desperate, grinding up into his mouth when he groans against her, the sound vibrating through her body and making her release his name as a breathy moan.

His free hand grips one of her thighs, pushing it out when her other thigh presses against his ear, her heel digging into his shoulder blade. Lydia’s gaze drift down to Stiles only to find him glancing up at her, his tongue slowly running over her clit as his fingers curl up inside of her, and she can’t help the way she tugs harder at his hair before one of her hands moves to twist her sheets between her fingers as she tumbles over the edge.

It takes a few long moments for Lydia to open her eyes, revelling in the way Stiles works her down then kisses his way back up her body, seemingly frantically worshipping every expanse of skin he can get to as his hands come up to cover her still bra-covered breasts. His hands are warm, and large, and Lydia pushes her chest further into them as his mouth finally meets hers again and his body slots back between hers. The warmth of her core connects with the bulge in his jeans, making both of them moan, before Lydia rolls them so she can settle on top of him.

“Tell me you have a condom in your pocket,” Lydia says against his lips as she drops her hand down to his jeans.

“No, I’m just really happy to see you,” Stiles replies, bucking his hips up into her.

A groaning laugh leaves her. She drops her head into the nape of his neck and teasingly nips at his pulse point. “ _Stiles_.”

“Front pocket.”

Her hand tugs the foil packet out of his pocket as Stiles unbuttons his jeans, lifting his hips so they can work his jeans and boxers down his legs, kicking them off the edge of the bed just as Lydia takes hold of him, her thumb running over the tip. She gives him a teasingly slow pump that makes his eyelids flutter shut and Lydia sighs; he really does have such a pretty face. When she lets go of him, it’s to rip the packet open and roll the condom onto him, not bothering to say anything or wait for him to open his eyes again before she lines him up and sinks down on him.

Stiles clutches her hips, bringing her down hard to meet his thrusts, as his eyes finally meet hers again. Reaching behind her, Lydia unhooks her bra and slides it down her arms, hurriedly throwing it behind her as one of Stiles’ hand slides up to cup a breast, rolling his thumb over her nipple. She sucks her bottom lip between her teeth and she drops her hands to his shoulders as she begins to ride him into oblivion, all chaotic and vigorous and greedy.

It’s a blur of sweaty limbs, accompanied by a litany of expletives and moans and the sound of their skin slapping together. Every movement of Stiles’ fingertips against her skin seems to electrify her every nerve-ending and she finds herself having to squeeze her eyes shut, her heart slamming against her chest hard enough that she’s sure Stiles can feel it. His mouth moves to take the place of his hand on her breast, teeth tugging her nipple into his mouth, while his hand wanders back down to her hip, continuing to help pull her down as his hips slam up. Lydia manages to catch herself, moving her hands to press against the mattress, as she falls forward, Stiles’ fingers moving to her clit.

“Fuck, Lydia,” Stiles chokes out, head falling back against her pillow. “Got myself off thinking about you riding me.”

Lydia breathes out a shaky breath. “God, Stiles.”

“And about burying myself between your thighs. But, _fuck_ , not even close.”

Flush with sweat, Lydia runs her fingers through his hair to tug his mouth back up to hers, the kiss feverish and sloppy and practically matching Stiles’ fingers on her clit, before she tightens around him like a vice and drops her head to his collarbone. Even slightly muffled against his skin, the moan she releases when she comes seems to echo through the room. In comparison, Stiles’ groan is like a whisper, just for her ears only, as he comes moments later, grasping Lydia’s thighs.

Lydia rolls off him and they lay there for a while, breathless and loose-limbed, Stiles only moving once to throw the condom in her trash bin. And, honestly, Lydia’s a little surprised at how easy it is to lay in silence with Stiles, staring up at her bedroom ceiling. But it is, and she feels content.

“That was...” Stiles begins, still a little out of breath.

“Yeah,” Lydia concurs, slightly breathless too.

He raises his palm up to her and, with a light-hearted roll of her eyes, Lydia slaps her palm against his before turning her head to see him smiling at her. It’s insufferable and warm and infectious, Lydia realizes as the corners of her mouth tug upwards and she leans forward to kiss him again.

This is really the best deviation of her Sunday routine that she ever could’ve imagined.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“So, how long are you going to stay?” Lydia asks, pushing around the food on her plate with her fork.

Stiles shrugs, his attention more on the tv screen than her. “As long as you’ll have me.”

“I’m serious.”

“Uh-huh, so am I.”

“ _Stiles_.”

Finally, he glances to her, putting his plate on her coffee table as he does. “Lyds, it’s not like I’m doing anything in Stanford. I mean, I make coffee, I hang out with Scott, and I either play chess with Morty or play video games with Scott or myself. It’s not exactly an action-packed summer I can’t miss.”

“ _So_... As long as I want you...”

“Is as long as you’ve got me, _yeah_.”

“And if I want you until the program is finished?”

“Then it’s a good thing my dad’s supplementing my rent. He’s totally gouging me on the loan’s interest though. I mean, 2%? Barbaric, right? I’m his son. Who else is going to look after him when he’s old and feeble? I mean, probably Scott and Melissa and maybe _you_. But still, I’m the fruit of his loins.”

“Stiles...”

“What?”

Running her tongue along her bottom lip, Lydia inhales a deep breath before placing her plate beside his. She ignores the heavy beating of her heart as her eyes find his, choosing to finally share the thoughts she’d had a few hours ago. “Stiles, I’m never going to not want you.”

His brow furrows, like he’s considering her words and is surprised by them, even though he really shouldn’t be. Which is a thought she does want to verbalize but decides not to, instead choosing to sit there and watch him watch her as he ruminates. Lydia does hate it a little, though, because she feels so open and she needs some confirmation that he’ll be as open as she is. Prior knowledge does tell her that he will be, but prior knowledge also reminds her that they can both be incredibly closed off when they want to be. And she can be aware that he wants her, but it’s not the same as actually admitting it outright, which is what she needs.

So she waits and she watches him stare at her and she pretends that the sound of her heartbeat isn’t echoing in her ears.

He runs his hand over his mouth before he softly nods. “Okay.”

“Excuse me?” Lydia disbelievingly asks.

“I don’t want to just be best friends who have sex anymore, Lydia. Because, you and me, we’re not ‘ _just_ ’ anything. If we were, I wouldn’t have gotten on a six hour flight to be here for you. And, yeah, okay, I know I said I didn’t need to define us, and I don’t _need_ to, but I _want_ to, because I want... _you_ ,” Stiles says before wincing. “Uh, I didn’t mean for that to rhyme. Actually, I wanted it to be more eloquent too.”

Suddenly, the heavy thumping of her heart isn’t due to nerves, and Lydia finds herself letting out an incredulous laugh. “When are you ever eloquent?”

“When the situation calls for it.”

“And our current situation doesn’t call for it?”

“Uh, yeah... I blame you for my inarticulacy.”

“I fluster you?”

“Shouldn’t really be a surprise at this point.”

Lydia laughs again, more wholehearted and unreserved, before she closes the distance between them, choosing to settle on top of him and rest her arms around his neck. “Now, when you say ‘define’, you don’t mean in a ‘giving me your pin and asking to go steady’ kind of way, do you?”

His hands come to rest against her back, slowly rubbing up and down. “Nah, I was thinking more in a ‘proclaim it on the Jumbotron during the big game’ kinda way. Or in a big, damn Ferris Bueller-inspired performance. Maybe to ‘Lay All Your Love on Me’.”

“You could sing.”

“Scott could dance.”

“ _Mmm_ ,” Lydia hums with a pinched brow and a blithe smile before she leans in to kiss him.

When he flips them so Lydia’s back is against the couch and he’s balanced over her with a tender smile that makes her melt, Lydia realizes that they don’t have to actually vocally define what they are to know what they are.

 

 

* * *

 

  

**From: Scott McCall                                      Today 1:01 am**

**_Dude, what happened?_ **

 

**To: Scott McCall                                         Today 1:02 am**

**Do you want basic or in-depth?**

 

**From: Scott McCall                                      Today 1:02 am**

**_In-depth unless it’s gross._ **

 

**To: Scott McCall                                         Today 1:02 am**

**Don’t worry, I’m not gonna divulge my sex life to you via imessage.**

 

**From: Scott McCall                                      Today 1:03 am**

**_You and Lydia had sex???_ **

 

**From: Scott McCall                                      Today 1:03 am**

**_You don’t have to tell me then, I know it went well._ **

 

**From: Scott McCall                                      Today 1:03 am**

**_But you two did have sex when you weren’t going well too then broke up like 15 hours later._ **

 

**From: Scott McCall                                      Today 1:04 am**

**_So sex could mean anything._ **

 

**To: Scott McCall                                         Today 1:04 am**

**Chill, Scotty. It’s good.**

 

**To: Scott McCall                                         Today 1:05 am**

**Lydia and I are good.**

 

**To: Scott McCall                                         Today 1:05 am**

**And not in a euphemistic way.**

 

**To: Scott McCall                                         Today 1:05 am**

**Well, I guess kinda euphemistic. I’ll tell you more tomorrow.**

 

**From: Scott McCall                                      Today 1:06 am**

**_Say hi to Lydia for me._ **

****

 

* * *

 

 

“Stiles, there’s something wrong with the connection. It sounded like you just said you were walking dogs.”

“No, that’s what I said.”

“ _You’re_ walking _dogs_?”

“I don’t know which inflection to react to first.”

“Do their owners know you’re walking them?”

“No, I was a little bored and thought I’d commit a felony.”

“I hope you know there’s nothing sexy about conjugal visits, Clyde.”

“Don’t worry, they’ll never catch me, Bon.”

“Whose dogs are you walking?”

“I can’t actually remember their names, but they live in your street. Apparently, I was cheaper than their usual service. And don’t make any jokes, it’s way too easy.”

“I might have to end our phone call then.”

“Anyway, it was either this or helping semi-sketchy people move.”

“You’re too attached to your kidneys to do that.”

“Exactly.”

“So, can you promise me that you’re not going to come home with a list of reasons why we should get a dog?”

“Uh... No. No, I can’t.”

“Can you at least make the list better than the last one?”

“Hey! I worked very hard on that list.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but your third point was: ‘dogs are awesome’.”

“Which I still believe to this day.”

“Sadly though, it wasn’t a good enough reason to adopt a dog when we lived in an apartment.”

“We could’ve gotten a _small_ dog.”

“Stiles, if we adopt a dog, it’ll be when we have an adequately-sized, permanent place.”

“Hmm.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just kinda sounds like you’re planning to be with me for a while.”

“At least until you commit a felony.”

“Can’t bear to see your man working on the chain gang?”

“Something like that.”

“I guess Scott could always bake something into a pie to aid my escape. I mean, if you did, the pie would be a weapon in itself... And son of a bitch.”

“Scott won’t aid your hypothetical prison break?”

“No, I just know myself well enough to know that if I try to pick up this dog’s shit while I use my shoulder to keep my phone against my ear, I’m gonna end up dropping said phone in said shit.”

“Your phone doesn’t really deserve to deal with any more.”

“Yeah, I provide it with plenty.”

“Make sure you don’t lose any dogs.”

“Make sure you don’t kick start the end of the world by accidentally mixing two test tubes together.”

“If I do, you’ll be the first one I tell.”

“I’m touched... Hey, Lydia?”

“Mmm-hmm?”

“I’m cool with waiting ‘til we’re in an adequately-sized, permanent place. Y’know, however long that is.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Most mornings over the past two weeks, Lydia’s woken up to find Stiles’ arm slung over her waist and his cheek pressed against the pillow next to hers, sometimes accompanied by a small amount of drool that she knows should turn her off yet astoundingly doesn’t. And somehow it still manages to warm her heart and makes it flutter.

Sometimes she stares at him with an inanely affectionate smile before she finally slides out of his embrace. Or she gently runs her fingers through his hair before he wakes up and gives her an inanely affectionate smile. Or he’s already awake when she wakes up and his thumb is tracing small circles around her hipbone, only opening his eyes when he feels her lips press against his.

Other mornings though, he kisses her cheek before rolling over, his soft snores filling the room shortly after. Or he folds his underneath his pillow so he can push it further against his cheek, and opens one eye to watch Lydia getting ready with a small, content smile because he can stay in bed longer than she can.

Either way, they usually wind up having morning sex. Somewhat sloppy, somewhat fervent, and somewhat bewildering morning sex that makes her heart hammer against her chest for more than a few reasons.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“I can’t believe you haven’t made a decision yet.”

“You do realize it’s not actually the life-or-death situation your tone is making it out to be, right?”

“You’ve been here for almost five weeks, Lydia.”

“I’ve had other priorities. Namely, _genuine_ priorities.”

“I’ve been here for more than a week and I’ve made a decision.”

“Okay, well, I trust your judgement.”

“You can’t on this.”

“You’re exasperating, Stiles.”

“Thank you,” he says, sincerely heartened, before he pushes the boxes towards her. “It’ll take, like, ten minutes.”

“ _Ten_ minutes to eat _two_ cannolis?”

“Yeah, five minutes each so you can really appreciate them and make an informed decision.”

Her eyes roll of their own volition but she yields with a small sigh. Stiles keeps his gaze on her as she takes a bite of each and she’s a little surprised he doesn’t say anything when she doesn’t eat the entirety of each one. After taking the time to consider, Lydia uses the tip of her pen to tap the box of her choice.

“Mike's Pastry,” Stiles says with a sage nod.

“Happy?”

“That my girlfriend chose the same cannoli as me? Hell yeah.”

Fighting the urge to smile at the title is a battle Lydia loses, ducking her head briefly in an attempt to play down the beam. “So, now will you give me thirty more minutes to finish this work before we go out to dinner?”

“I’ll give you fifty.”

“You want to try to catch up on ‘The Walking Dead’?”

“There are cannibals, Lydia. Like, they’re really taking ‘eat or be eaten’ literally; it’s awesome and super creepy.”

“Okay, but only one episode, then we’re actually going out to dinner. We can’t become the hermit couple.”

She ends up joining him on the couch when she’s finished, Stiles lifting his arms so she can drape her legs over his as she settles against the couch’s armrest. During the credits, as Stiles is absentmindedly grazing his hand along her leg, he recaps everything that she’s missed on the show, which is basically everything after the first season because that was the last season she watched with him; the only pieces of information she has are that there are apparently cannibals and that a few characters are dead, at least that’s what she assumes from Stiles’ sporadic wheezes.

Their plans turn into ordering take-out and watching the majority of season five, not going out to a restaurant then seeing the band Stiles had been talking about, and they end up in a debate about who would be able to survive in the zombie apocalypse, which starts concerning just the two of them and quickly transpires to also include their closest friends.

“Okay, Lydia, I’ll admit that Isaac would probably be able to survive for a while if you admit that it would only be because a zombie wouldn’t be able to bite through any of his scarves.”

“It seems impractical for Isaac to continue to wear scarves given the situation.”

“ _Yeah_ , but I wouldn’t put it past him.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Occasionally, Lydia and Stiles go out with some of the friends she’s made. Mostly to coffee shops and parties, where they’ll sit around and talk with her friends and make new ones in the process, or they’ll dance, or they’ll find a secluded place to be alone for a while.

One night in particular manages to remind Lydia of the Beacon Hills parties, and it takes her a little by surprise when it does.

Lydia’s busy on her phone, trying to find them an uber home, while Stiles continues to babble to the host about baseball. And it’s in the moment when Lydia glances up at the host, who’s trying to clean up and be semi-engaged in the conversation with Stiles, that she remembers all the times she’d had to drag a drunk and babbling Stiles from a party and haul him home without alerting either of their parents.

A small smile breaks across her face as she watches Stiles try to help clean up in an effort to prolong a conversation that’s quickly turning into a monologue. In the back of her mind, she can hear Stiles’ voice – _“maybe I liked you more than I didn’t like you”_ – and she thinks, not for the first time, that it was true for both of them. Stiles may have driven her crazy on a regular basis, but their verbal interactions tended to be one of the highlights of her day. And, no matter how annoyed she may have been or complaints she had the next day, sometimes she did actually enjoy being responsible for drunk, babbling Stiles. Emphasis on _sometimes_ though, because there were definitely some unenjoyable occasions, which usually made her sincerely ponder leaving him to find his own way home.

Now, even though their circumstance is different, here she is, fingers entwined with a drunk and babbling Stiles’ as she drags him from a party because the host wants to everyone out.

And, honestly, it’s nice to know that some things don’t change.

 

 

* * *

 

 

There’s a moment one night during their last week in Boston, when they’re sitting on the couch watching tv, that Stiles brings it up. Remarkably, it’s not in a flippant “hey, remember when I impulsively proposed to you and then we _never_ wanted to talk about it so we broke up” way; he does preface the discussion by telling her that lightning can actually strike the same place twice, but he says it with a seriousness she seldom sees from him.

They talk about it for what feels like hours.

Everything they left unsaid becomes said. All of their thoughts, and their fears, and their indecisions are brought out into the open.

They sit there, and they talk, because lightning can strike twice and they both need the reassurance that they can weather whatever tragedy comes their way. They both need to know that what they have now isn’t going to fall apart again, not the way it did before. Because it’s easy to think of hypothetical plans for their future, and to get lost in being with each other and in the relationship they have now, but it’s harder to actually discuss everything they’ve only, _really_ , shallowly talked about before.

And by the end of it, Lydia feels open and susceptible, like she’s wavering in the inflammatory stage of healing because her white blood cells can’t perform their basic function. But then she remembers that she’s not the only one who feels like that, which makes it substantially easier.

They know what they want; they want each other and this and everything to come.

Lydia loves Stiles.

And Stiles loves Lydia.

And they both know that they’ll fight for what they have.

And that makes vulnerability a less daunting sensation for Lydia.

 

 

* * *

 

 

On the last night of the program, when they’re at the farewell dinner, Lydia conclusively decides, in her head, that this is her top choice for grad schools.

Stiles conclusively decides, in his head, that he’s gonna like living in Boston.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It starts with a simple mile high club joke.

And in hindsight, Lydia should have realized that it was going to spiral from there.

Though to his credit, Stiles manages to restrain himself from talking about it. For the most part. The night before they leave, he tries to _subtly_ introduce it into their conversation by making another joke about it while they’re cleaning up, which amuses her more than is evident in her expression. It’s something she has thought about before, namely when she was flying to Boston and wondering what it would have been like to have Stiles sitting in the seat beside her. She doesn’t mention this to Stiles, instead choosing to listen to him talk about it with an unsuccessfully suppressed enthusiasm that makes her smile.

But it’s his expression that cements her decision in the end. The way his cheeks redden and his eyes light up is enough to make her stomach flip.

So, when he turns his head in her direction two hours into the flight, Lydia already knows the basic idea that’s about to fall from his lips and she already knows what her response will be.

Still, she takes a moment before finally turning to him. “Yes?”

“Wanna go make some turbulence of our own?” Stiles asks with a waggle of his eyebrows.

Lydia bites her lip, the sound of her laugh becomes muted but the corners of her mouth still manage to pull upwards in an amused smile. And it’s in that moment that Stiles’ expression shifts, because he realizes what her answer is without her actually having to say it aloud.

Which is when Lydia realizes she was wrong, because _that’s_ the expression that cements her decision.

She’s the first one to walk to the bathroom.

There’s not exactly an abundance of space, but it’s not like they’re not used to being in close spaces together. Actually, they usually manage to thrive in them.

Lydia stands there and waits three minutes before unlocking the bathroom door. Forethought leads to her pushing herself up to sit on the basin, which is where she finds herself when Stiles finally enters, still looking slightly overwhelmed that this is actually happening but incredibly enthusiastic as he locks the door once again. When his eyes meet hers, it’s like a kaleidoscope has been released in her. It shouldn’t be a surprise though; time and time again, Stiles manages to make her truly understand and appreciate the ‘butterflies in the stomach’ idiom.

His enthusiasm falters slightly as he glances around the space, the logistics clearly becoming a pertinent issue in his brain that he had otherwise overlooked in his interest, and Lydia fights the urge to smile again. Instead, Lydia hooks her legs around his waist and tugs him flush with her. It's then that the concern fades from his expression and he drops his hands to her hips.

And as she meets his eyes, takes in his expression, feels her heart begin to race and warmth flood her body, she thinks of the math that used to put her at ease. She thinks of certainties, and possibilities, and impossibilities.

Originally, Stiles was an impossibility for her at one point, someone she once held in contempt due to obnoxious behaviour and circumstance and what turned out to be belligerent sexual tension.

Then he was a possibility for her at one point, someone she could see herself maintaining a stable and long-lasting relationship with.

Then he managed to become an uncertainty and a possibility again in the matter of a few months.

And now?

Now, Stiles isn’t an impossibility. And she knows that he isn’t _just_ a possibility either.

A smile breaks across her face as her hands move to grip his flannel and softly pull him towards her. When he smiles at her, affectionate and stunning and just the right amount of lascivious, and she feels the warmth under her skin begin to radiate once more, it falls from her lips before she has a chance to stop herself.

“Take me for a ride, Stilinski.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Did you like it? Did you love it? Please spare my heart if you hated it though. But I really do hope you enjoyed this part, it was the hardest fic I've ever written and I absolutely love it. If you do as well, please leave a kudos or a comment or come talk to me on [tumblr](http://brittaperry.tumblr.com/) because I would love to hear from you and it makes my day when I do!


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